Michael Strauss: Science Collaborator, All-Star

Like so many of the talented people who joined LSST early, Science Advisory Committee (SAC) Chair Michael Strauss’ path to the Project was similar to that of a blue chip high school athlete committing to an elite college program. In 2006, Chief Scientist Tony Tyson, Project Scientist Zeljko Ivezic and now-Director Steven M. Kahn recruited Michael to define and lead the LSST Science Collaborations. Since then, he has been a Project all-star, liaising between LSST and the broader scientific community by leading the SAC and Science Collaborations, spearheading the writing and editing of the 598 page LSST Science Book, and serving on the LSST Corporation (LSSTC) Executive Board.

As chair of the LSST SAC, Michael sees his primary responsibility as juggling the tension between the huge range of different science that LSST enables and the need to keep the Project focused on the construction phase schedule and budget. The SAC advises the LSST Director on matters of science policy, interaction with the broader scientific community, and scientific impact of construction decisions. As an LSSTC board member, he has also been involved in negotiations with various potential foreign partners who wish to contribute to LSST during operations.

Michael brings a wealth of survey astronomy experience to LSST, having been involved with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) for more than 20 years and currently participating in a collaboration to carry out a wide-field imaging survey with Hyper-Suprime Cam (HSC) on the 8.2-meter Subaru Telescope of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.

“I have always been a survey astronomer; I enjoy the challenge of building large projects that map the sky,” Michael said. “LSST really represents the next great survey of the sky after Sloan and HSC. And one of the things we learned from Sloan is the importance of strong and realistic project management and budget. LSST has taken this lesson to heart – in particular being very realistic about the challenge of the software needed to process all these data.”

Michael identified software as the area where he feels LSST is pushing the state-of-the-art the hardest. LSST’s software is being designed to capture, in the measured properties of each object, optimally calculated quantities from which people will be able to do their science. But, he said, it’s more than a technical challenge.

“We have to remember that this is first and foremost a scientific project, and thus, we need to make sure the software team is given the freedom to think like scientists, and that the scientific community is in communication with the software team.”

Michael’s personal scientific interests include questions of cosmology, as well as the evolution of galaxies and quasars. LSST will explore the nature of faint, and thus, distant galaxies, providing new insights on their evolution. His passion for astronomy began in his senior year of high school when he took an introductory college-level course in astronomy. He earned both a bachelor of arts in Astronomy and Physics and a Ph.D. in Physics from University of California at Berkeley. His thesis was a full-sky redshift survey of IRAS galaxies. He served post-doctoral fellowships at Caltech and Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, where he first became involved with SDSS. He has been a member of the Princeton Astrophysical Sciences faculty since 1994.

Michael is excited about the future LSST enables, “Astronomy is changing rapidly. The onset of large surveys like LSST means that top astronomy is no longer done solely by those lucky few at institutions with access to the largest telescopes. The field has become much more democratic, and the skill set that the next generation of astronomers needs will include the ability to manipulate huge datasets and to understand the nitty-gritty of the data, with all their power and their warts. In 5 years, we’ll be madly preparing for LSST data to start flowing, and getting the scientific community to start drinking from the fire hose of data. In 10 years, I hope to be drinking from that flood myself, as part of large and small scientific collaborations to start tapping all the tremendous scientific potential of the data. “

Article by Robert McKercher and Michael Strauss