Leadership

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

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.

Jennifer Lotz

Gemini Observatory Director

Jennifer Lotz received her PhD in astrophysics from Johns Hopkins University in 2003. Prior to her appointment at Gemini, she held a tenured associate astronomer position at the Space Telescope Science Institute and a joint appointment as a research scientist at Johns Hopkins University. Previously, she was a Leo Goldberg Fellow at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, and a postdoctoral fellow at U.C. Santa Cruz. She is a leading expert in the field of galaxy mergers, and makes use of both ground-based and space telescopes to track the growth of galaxies over cosmic time.

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. 

John Maclean

Center Operations Services Director

(Safety, IT and Facilities Operations)

John Maclean brings more than 15 years of experience at the Advanced Photon Source (Argonne National Laboratory) where he was most recently Associate Division Director for the Engineering Support Division. His responsibilities there included IT systems, business systems, and the accelerator control system of the light source, providing beam time to more than 5500 users a year. Maclean previously spent two years with Gemini Observatory in Hilo as the Primary Mirror Control System engineer and before that was at the Royal Greenwich Observatory. For NOIRLab, he is responsible for the overall management and administration of Center Operations Services, including: safety, health, and environment; non-scientific (“outside the telescope enclosure”) facilities operations; and IT operations. Maclean will start in this position in June, based in Tucson for several months before relocating to La Serena for two years, after which he will return to Tucson.

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.