Lynne Jones—LSST Performance Scientist and a Whole Lot More

Lynne Jones seems to run at work and at play—both at high speed and for the long run. As LSST Performance Scientist she integrates the Operations Simulation, Calibration Simulation, and Image Simulation groups, making sure that the science concerns from the science collaborations are being addressed and that their outputs are available for the collaborations. She also does stand-alone evaluations of things such as filter bandpasses and is involved with implementing the Moving Object Pipeline. She has found time to co-lead The Solar System and The Transient and Variable Universe chapters of the LSST Science Book as well as contribute to two other chapters. In addition to the LSST work, Lynne collaborates with colleagues in Canada, France, and the US on the Canada-France Ecliptic Plane Survey (CFEPS), which was part of the CFHT Legacy Survey, works with Andy Becker on Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) and is figuring out ways to apply the new many-core (GPU) technology to planetary astronomy problems. And she finished the 5K Torchlight Run in Seattle in just under 36 minutes.

For someone who didn’t expect to be doing astronomy when she was young (even though her dad painted stars on her bedroom wall and her sister went to Space Camp “twice!”), Lynne now would be very happy to be working on LSST for the next ten to fifteen years. Lynne found LSST a great fit after her first post-doc when she was looking for work that was “more connected with the community, had more short-term goals and more diversity.” She considers LSST a great project for her because it has endless opportunities for her to learn and expand professionally.

Lynne started her association with LSST as the LSST Science Fellow in Fall 2006 at the University of Washington (UW) after completing a post-doc at the University of British Columbia (and briefly at the Herzburg Institute for Astronomy) following her doctoral work at the University of Michigan. Her astronomy background is in observational surveys for faint moving objects—shift and stack surveys for faint Kuiper Belt objects as well as wide-field surveys for brighter TNOs—certainly a useful foundation for the deep-drilling projects proposed for LSST.

Lynne’s research interests continue to expand as she works on the LSST project: from small bodies of the Solar System to a growing interest in transients and variables and the technology needed to accomplish the science. Asked what fascinates her most about LSST science, Lynne responds: “I’m really fascinated by how LSST is so multi-functional (within astronomy) and multi-disciplinary (combining computer science and astronomy and physics).”

One month in the life of Lynne Jones captures much of LSST’s progress. In the last month, Lynne prepared evaluations of various u and y band filters for the Science Council (taking spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of various sources and looking at the effects of varying these bandpasses on the science return, such as separation of stars/quasars in color-color space). She obtained SEDs from the science collaborations of a variety of objects (white dwarfs, red dwarfs, and Kurucz models) to put into the appropriate format for the Image Simulation Data Challenge 3b (DC3b) catalog generation, which is starting now, and generating LSST color-color plots at the same time. She sent detailed information about the self-calibration effort to new LSST collaborators in France, including software examples that she wrote with Zeljko Ivezic and Nikhil Padmanaban while all were at the Aspen workshop, Wide-Fast-Deep Surveys: New Astrophysics Frontiers, last summer. In addition, Jon Myers visited UW, and Lynne worked with him for a week integrating OpenOrb (an open-source orbit fitting and ephemeris prediction software package from Mikael Granvik) into LSST’s catalog generation, as well as generating approximately 1 TB of nightly ephemerides to cover DC3b moving object generation and writing the other portions of the moving object catalog-generation module. She submitted a UW portion of a collaborative NSF proposal relating to GPU programming and attended an exciting Manycore/GPU meeting. Finally Lynne also prepared plots for the OpSim AAS poster, helping evaluate the time distribution of observations across the sky. Whew! And that’s just the LSST work.

Ivezic commends her work and influence: “Since becoming the first LSST Science Fellow three years ago, Lynne has devoted all her time and heart to LSST. She is extremely capable, and it was great news for the project when she agreed to serve as the LSST Performance Scientist a few months back. When I see young people like Lynne, who have many career options, become so excited about LSST, I myself feel more confident that we shall succeed.”

Lynne manages to find the balance in life and in research that keeps it all exciting and challenging. A lifelong sailor (even living on her boat for six years), she started playing the guitar and taking photographs to add to the diversity she also craves in her work and to achieve the balance she admires in others such as Ivezic. LSST has provided her with a working environment that promotes professional and personal growth. “I think who you work for and with is really important. I’d advise all young researchers and students to find people who inspire you and try to work with them or follow their example.”

Anna Spitz worked with Lynne Jones on this profile.