New Gemini Staff

Scientific programmer at Gemini North

Name:  Daniel Berke (pronounced like it rhymes with quirky)

Position: Scientific programmer

Location: Gemini North, Hilo, Hawai‘i

Past Experience: Three years of data quality analysis with the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope and six months as a telescope operator on the Yuan-Tseh Lee Array on Mauna Loa before getting a PhD at Swinburne University in Melbourne (2017–2021).

Research Interests: Varying fundamental constants, high-resolution spectroscopy; for my PhD I developed a new method of constraining variation in the fine-structure constant at the 10 ppb level using Sun-like stars for the first time.

Observatory Service Duties: Working on the DRAGONS pipeline for reducing Gemini data, supporting users.
 

Scientific Programmer at Gemini South

Name: Olejsa Smirnova

Position: Scientific Programmer

Location: Gemini South, La Serena, Chile

Past Experience:  After finishing my PhD at the University of Latvia, I have worked as a Support Astronomer at Nordic Optical Telescope in the Canary Islands and as a Science Operations Specialist at Gemini North in Hawai‘i.

Observatory Service Duties: I will be working on the development of DRAGONS software for Gemini data reduction.
 

Associate Scientist at Gemini North

Name:  Monika Soraisam 

Position: Associate Scientist

Location: Gemini North, Hilo, Hawai‘i

Past Experience: After my PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany, I joined NOIRLab (NOAO at the time) in Tucson as a postdoc, working primarily on the development of the ANTARES alert broker. I continued my work on ANTARES, as well as my scientific research, as a Survey Science Fellow at NCSA, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign before moving to Gemini North in September 2021.

Research Interests: My research sits at the juncture of time-domain astronomy and data science. I study populations of stellar variables and transients in nearby galaxies using data from large-scale time-domain surveys and develop statistical models for finding peculiar astrophysical events in real time in the alert streams of these surveys.

Observatory Service Duties: I will be working on the development of the DRAGONS software and on general user support issues.

Assistant Scientist at Gemini South

Name: Rodolfo Angeloni

Position: Assistant Scientist 

Location: Gemini South,  La Serena, Chile
 
Past Experience: Rodolfo got his PhD from University of Padova (Italy) in 2009. That same year he moved to Chile as a FONDECYT Postdoctoral Fellow at PUC, then as a Support Astronomer at the MPG 2.2-m telescope in the La Silla ESO Observatory. From 2014 to 2017 he was Science Fellow at Gemini South, then moving to the University of La Serena, where he's been faculty member of the local Department of Astronomy. Now he's back at Gemini as an Assistant Scientist. 
 
Research Interests: His research interests range from the multi-wavelength characterization of stellar variability and interacting binaries with a special emphasis on symbiotic stars, to the study of the Artificial LIght at Night (ALAN) effects on the Chilean sky. He is also active in the field of Cultural Astronomy.
 

Associate Scientist at Gemini North

Name: Emanuele Paolo Farina

Position: Associate Scientist

Location: Gemini North, Hilo, Hawai‘i

Past Experience: My first observing run was with the Loiano 152-cm Cassini Telescope (in a small town on the North Appennine ridge not far from Bologna). We had so much fun and we collected such beautiful data that I decided that I wanted more. Since then, I had the privilege to see some of the best skies in the world and to use several of the big mirrors (VLT, LBT, and KECKs) while working at the University of Insubria in Italy, the University of California Santa Barbara, the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany, and at ESO/Terma in Germany. 

Research Interests: I use quasars as cosmic lighthouses to explore the formation of galaxies and black holes at the epoch of reionization and to investigate their evolution with cosmic time. In particular, I am pursuing studies of the circumgalactic medium at the highest accessible redshifts to unveil the fingerprints of the baryon cycle on the hazy gas halos of the first galaxies.
 
Observatory Service Duties: I will be providing support for the IFU modes of the different instruments at GEMINI North, with focus on GNIRS. Helping with observations, data reduction, and all the little things that help to deliver the best possible data to the PIs.