Our interdisciplinary team is exploring the use of rainwater harvesting for irrigating gardens during our long and dry summer months. This news article explains our work in more detail.

Exciting results from the DESI survey that you can read about in our March 2025 press release. DESI’s latests results suggest that dark energy could be fundamentally different than previously thought. Instead of being a “Cosmological Constant”, dark energy may have an equation of state that varies with time. These results made international headline news with news articles published in leading newspapers!

We are honored to be funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation for a new pilot program to support diversity equity and inclusion. The program will work with STEM Latinx undergraduates and elementary school kids to create science experiments in gardens and to support STEM learning in the current and next generation of Latinx students.

You can read more about it in this UCSC news article.

We started the 62 night Merian program on the Blanco telescope on March 5th. We had beautiful weather on the first night with excellent seeing. Exciting start for this new program!

We had a very large program approved! The Merian survey is a new program that will use 62 nights on the Blanco telescope starting in 2021 to build an unprecedented sample of dwarf galaxies. I am co-leading this program together with Jenny Greene. More details can be found on The Merian Survey website.

Wonderful news today! The LSST telescope has been renamed after Vera Rubin (credited with cementing the discovery of dark matter). This will be the first national US observatory to be named after a women.

https://www.lsst.org/news/vro-press-release

Massive and old galaxies still harbor new surprises. A new publication by Song Huang uses weak gravitational lensing to reveal a tight correlation between the total stellar mass, the shape of the galaxy profile (or size of the galaxy) and it’s parent dark matter halo. This study harnesses the unique imaging capabilities of the Hyper Supreme Cam survey on the Subaru telescope.

The first Cosmic shear measurements from the Hyper Supreme Cam Survey (HSC) on Subaru are now on the arXive (Hikage et al. 2018) !! This paper is the culmination of a tremendous effort of many scientists across the globe and a testimony to the beautiful data quality of the HSC camera on the Subaru Telescope. The HSC cosmic shear results are in agreement with Planck. However, interestingly, in a similar fashion to several other lensing surveys, the constraints in terms of the Sigma8 and OmegaM parameters are slightly offset. A consistent reanalysis of various lensing data sets, and higher signal-to-noise constraints from the full HSC data set will help to rule out or confirm this much discussed offset. More details can be found in our press release.

I am honored to be awarded a DOE CAREER grant to work on DESI and LSST! Very excited to start to begin collecting DESI data soon (2019/2020)

I am honored and grateful to be selected by the Alfred P Sloan Foundation as a 2018 recipient of their Research Fellowship!