I am an astronomer with the Subaru telescope. My position with Subaru is its Instrument Division Chief. This means I am in charge of the group of people who help maintain, repair, and commission new instruments for the Subaru Telescope. Instruments are the devices that analyze the light collected by telescopes' mirrors. In the old days of astronomy, instruments were simply eyepieces and astronomers' eyeballs. These days, most telescopes don't have eyepieces at all (although most astronomers do still have eyeballs) and we rely on a comprehensive set of instruments, each analyzing the gathered light in a different way, to extract our science from our targets of choice.

My research interests include, of course, instrumentation - designing and improving new and current instruments, the white dwarf stars (evolutionary endpoints of most known stars in the Galaxy), and science with large scale surveys. The latter interest stems in part from my involvement with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey - an epic project to map 1/2 the Northern Hemisphere. Still larger and deeper (fainter) surveys are currently being planned on other telescopes, including Subaru. Together, these surveys represent a new era in how we approach and do our astronomy research and provide compelling lists of interesting topics for follow-up observations on non-survey telescopes.

I also have a basic interest in science and astronomy education. Due to its popular support, astronomy can serve as a great introduction to scientific principles and logic. In addition, at higher levels of study, the traditional roles of astronomy are changing (in part due to larger and larger telescopes and surveys) and our training needs to be adjusted to reflect these changing circumstances.

I am new to the Islands, having moved here summer, 2005, but am enjoying life here immensely, even having cast aside my water ski and started learning to surf. Otherwise, I enjoy reading, computing, working on and talking about my cars, baking sourdough bread, and even juggling and unicycling, from time to time.