Phil Marshall—New Royal Society University Research Fellow

Anna H. Spitz

The LSST Science Collaboration Teams consist of more than 230 members. Here we profile Phil Marshall, chair of the strong lensing team, prompted by his being chosen as one of thirty University Research Fellows of the Royal Society, the national academy of science of the UK and the Commonwealth. This prestigious fellowship is a research-only position, which Phil plans to take up at Oxford University in 2010.

The Royal Society University Research Fellows are young scientists across all natural scientific disciplines with the potential to become leaders in their chosen field. Phil’s outstanding work on gravitational lensing, first as a graduate student at the University of Cambridge and then in California, earned him the distinction of being one of a handful of University Research Fellows with a specialty in astronomy selected this year. This fellowship is highly competitive with an acceptance rate of just 5%. The fellowships generally run for five years with the possibility of a three-year extension. Fellows are strong candidates for permanent posts at the end of their fellowships.

Since September 2006 Phil has been the TABASGO prize postdoctoral research fellow in the astrophysics group at the University of California at Santa Barbara. As TABASGO fellow he is paid by and thus affiliated with the Las Cumbres Observatory (LCOGT). Prior to his current appointment and after completing his PhD in 2003, Phil was one of the first generation of postdocs at the newly-formed Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) at Stanford.

Phil’s principal research interest is gravitational lensing. With Tommaso Treu, Marusa Bradac, Raphael Gavazzi, and Matt Auger at UCSB he is working on a number of observational projects on galaxy-scale lens systems, investigating the use of adaptive optics, and calibrating samples of standard masses for cosmology. He is very interested in statistical studies of large samples of gravitational lenses. He leads the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Archive Galaxy-scale Gravitational Lens Search, which is combing hundreds of HST images for gravitational lenses, and he is also a member of the Strong Lens Legacy Survey, an international project to find and follow-up lenses in the Canada France Hawai’i Telescope (CFHT) legacy survey. These are precursor surveys for LSST.

Phil says that, like all astrophysicists, he works in the low signal-to-noise regime where information is at a premium and prior knowledge inevitably becomes important at some stage - developing probabilistic methods for data analysis is a continuing theme in his work. He is especially interested in the problem of extracting the maximum amount of information from LSST’s survey imaging, given how expensive it would be to follow up the huge samples of interesting things it will discover. The LSST data analysis challenge is big enough that he is starting work on it now: Phil has opted to defer his Royal Society position for a year, and spend that time as Kavli Fellow at the KIPAC laboratory at Stanford University, preparing the software development environment so that he can continue work on it from the UK.

Kudos and continued success to Phil.