Leadership

Hierarchical organizational structure at NOIRLab.

Top-Level conceptual organizational structure at NOIRLab showing the Programs (vertical) and cross-cutting matrixed Labor Pools and Services (horizontal).

Patrick McCarthy Director Patrick McCarthy is the former Vice President of the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization and an Astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science. McCarthy is a world-recognized astronomical leader; his seminal work on galaxy evolution and the high-redshift universe has earned him wide scientific respect and recognition. He has spent more than thirty years working with the NOIRLab facilities, as a frequent observer and as a member of advisory and oversight committees. McCarthy’s experience of large projects, including developing instruments for Hubble and his leadership roles in the Giant Magellan Telescope Project, will be invaluable as NOIRLab charts its path through the coming decade and beyond.
Stuartt Corder Deputy Director Stuartt Corder has a strong history of leadership in astronomy with more than 15 years of experience in building, operating, and further developing groundbreaking, large-scale, advanced scientific and technical programs and facilities. He has been in Chile for more than a decade, holding a number of senior leadership roles in the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observatory and NSF’s National Radio Astronomy Observatory. His research interests include planet and star formation, and synthesis imaging in interferometry.
Inger Jørgensen Chief Sustainability Officer Inger Jørgensen is NOIRLab’s Chief Sustainability Officer and is based in Hilo, Hawai‘i. Jørgensen is a highly accomplished and widely respected astronomer who focuses her research on understanding the formation and evolution of galaxies. After two prestigious postdoctoral fellowships (Harlan J. Smith Fellow and then Hubble Fellow) at the McDonald Observatory, Jørgensen joined the Gemini Observatory in 1998 shortly before the first observations were made from Gemini North in Hawai‘i. At Gemini Jørgensen held positions ranging from Instrument Scientist to Head of Science Operations, and Portfolio Manager. From 2020-2023 she served as NOIRLab's Associate Director for Operations.
Wendy Swartz Associate Director of Administration Swartz is an accomplished leader with over 20+ years of higher education administration experience focused on financial and business functions, operations, process management and improvement, and leadership. She has a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from the University of Dayton, and a Master of Administration from Northern Arizona University (NAU), and is also a Certified Public Accountant. Most recently she served as Associate Vice President for Financial Administration and Comptroller at NAU, where she was on staff from 2005 to 2023.
Scott Dahm International Gemini Observatory Interim Director Scott Dahm joined the International Gemini Observatory as Deputy Director January 2023 before being appointed Interim Director in January 2024. He received his PhD in astronomy from the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa under George Herbig, on the study of young stellar clusters. He subsequently served as an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech, a staff astronomer at W. M. Keck Observatory and as the Chief Scientist and acting Station Director for Naval Observatory, Flagstaff Station. Scott is also a retired US Naval Officer.
Lori Allen Mid-Scale Observatories (MSO) Director Lori Allen joined the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in 2009 from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics where she was a member of the IRAC instrument team for the Spitzer Space Telescope. Allen has served as Associate Director of Kitt Peak since 2014. In the position of Acting Director of NOAO, she was responsible for top level management of NOAO and continuing senior management of Kitt Peak. Allen received her PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and is a member of the Spitzer Science Center Oversight Committee and of the AAS Committee on Light Pollution, Radio Interference and Space Debris. Her research interests include wide-field surveys, star and planet formation, protoplanetary disk evolution, asteroids and galactic archaeology. Lori is Director of the Mid-Scale Observatories (MSO) which includes the Kitt Peak and Cerro Tololo Observatories.
Bob Blum Rubin Observatory Operations Director Bob Blum became Rubin Observatory Operations Director in October 2018 after 21 years at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, where he was Deputy Director for 10 years. Blum’s research interest is large survey science with a focus on studies of the Milky Way and the Local Volume. Prior to his role as Deputy Director, Blum spent 10 years at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile as a staff astronomer.
Adam Bolton Community Science and Data Center Director Adam Bolton came to the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in December 2015 from the faculty of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Utah, where he played a leading role in the data management and scientific data analysis efforts of the SDSS and DESI projects. He received his PhD in 2005 from MIT, held postdoctoral fellowships at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, and received a Department of Energy Early Career Research Award at the University of Utah. His research interests are in observational cosmology, massive galaxy evolution, gravitational lensing, and astrostatistics.
Michiel van der Hoeven Engineering Services Director Before becoming ES director, Michiel van der Hoeven was the Head of Engineering Operations at Gemini South Observatory. He led a group of technical professionals in charge of operating and maintaining the Gemini 8-meter telescope, the instruments and all associated systems. Previously, van der Hoeven worked at the La Palma observatory where he was responsible for starting up the first scientific operations of the GRANTECAN, Spain’s 10-meter segmented telescope. Prior to that, he worked as an instrumentation/mechanical engineer at the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes.
Abhijit Saha Research and Science Services Director Abhijit Saha is an astronomer who has worked with AURA facilities since 1988, starting at Space Telescope Science Institute where he headed the User Support branch. He then moved to the National Optical Astronomy Observatory where he has been for the past two decades. Saha is one of the most widely recognized scientists at NOIRLab having made many outstanding contributions in observations of variable stars, Galactic structure, resolved stellar populations in Local Group galaxies, and the extragalactic distance scale. Saha also has a wealth of experience in telescope operations including as Interim Director of Kitt Peak National Observatory. He has played key roles in the WIYN operations and has served as the NOAO Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (now the Vera C. Rubin Observatory) Project Scientist, developing operations simulations. He contributed to the LSST science programs as lead of the Stellar Populations Science Collaboration, and co-initiated building the ANTARES event broker for time-domain alerts.
Lucas Macri US-ELTP Director Lucas Macri came to NOIRLab in May 2023, having spent the previous 15 years as a professor of Astronomy at Texas A&M University where he also served as Associate Dean for Undergraduate Programs since 2017. He received his PhD in 2001 from Harvard University and held joint Hubble and Goldberg postdoctoral fellowships at NOAO between 2002 and 2008. His research interests are in the extragalactic distance scale and the search for electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational wave sources.