Adam Bolton Joins NOAO as Associate Director for the NOAO System Science and Data Center

Adam Bolton, Associate Director, NOAO System Science and Data Center

NOAO welcomes Adam Bolton as the new Associate Director (AD) of the NOAO System Science and Data Center (NSSDC). Bolton brings to NOAO broad and deep technical expertise in imaging and spectroscopic surveys that is motivated by his research interest in galaxies, dark matter, and dark energy. He takes over from the outgoing NSSDC AD, Verne Smith.

Bolton comes to NOAO from a position as Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Utah, where he has been on the faculty since 2009. He previously held the Beatrice Watson Parrent postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Hawaii (2007-2009) and a CfA Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (2005-2007). He received his PhD in Physics from MIT in 2005.

Bolton has extensive research experience in the analysis of astronomical imaging and spectroscopy, and in the application of new statistical methods to large surveys. His research interests include the use of strong gravitational lensing to measure the mass structure of galaxies, and the development of advanced spectroscopic analysis methods to enable and exploit new surveys of the universe beyond our own galaxy.

The Principal Data Scientist for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) since 2012, Bolton has also been a leader in proposing and designing the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), which is destined for the Mayall telescope on Kitt Peak, and its associated data management and analysis systems. His interest in and experience with large data sets will be an asset to NOAO as it evolves to meet the changing needs of the astronomical community.

In his view, “Astronomy, like any living science, is always undergoing transformation. In optical astronomy, we are experiencing a great turning towards large-scale surveys as a dominant mode of experimental design. These surveys produce large and complex digital data archives that support a huge variety of research projects, many of them requiring computationally intensive analysis. I am extremely excited to have the opportunity as NSSDC AD to serve in advancing survey science and open data access throughout astronomy.”

In announcing the appointment, NOAO Director David Silva remarked, “One of our major goals at NOAO is to help the US community remain at the forefront of astronomical digital data management, processing and archiving. Adam is the right leader at the right time to help NOAO develop and deploy new services that the community can use to access and analyze large, rich catalogs of millions of objects across the entire celestial sphere.”