César Briceño Appointed SOAR Director

César Briceño has been appointed the Director of the SOAR Telescope, taking over from Jay Elias. We thank Jay Elias for his dedication and leadership during the ten years in which he served as SOAR Director.

César is a Scientist at NSF NOIRLab, based at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in La Serena, Chile. He earned his Doctor in Science (ScD) from the Universidad Central de Venezuela, where his research focused on star formation; his doctoral thesis work, as a Smithsonian Pre-Doctoral Fellow, focused on mapping the low-mass end of the young stellar population of the Taurus dark clouds, under the mentorship of Lee W. Hartmann at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He continues working on characterizing young stellar populations in our galaxy, focusing on stellar demographics and multiplicity studies.

After a postdoctoral stay at Yale University, he took a position as a staff astronomer at the Centro de Investigaciones de Astronomía (CIDA) in Mérida, Venezuela, where he was eventually appointed Deputy Director. Since joining NOIRLab in 2013, he has worked as the SOAR Telescope Scientist, leading efforts to enhance its efficiency and science output. Since 2017 he has also been Chair of the SOAR Scientific Advisory Committee.

César has led the development and implementation of the Astronomical Event Observatory Network (AEON) project at SOAR, and more recently at the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope, optimizing these facilities for time-domain and multi-messenger astronomy. 

The SOAR Telescope was initiated by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1987. The final project development team was formed at the beginning of 1997. SOAR is a joint project of the Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovações do Brasil (MCTIC/LNA), NSF NOIRLab, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), and Michigan State University (MSU).

Congratulations to César on his appointment!