Originally from the Indian Wells Valley in California’s Northern Mojave Desert, I attended Sherman E. Burroughs High School (Class of 1979) in Ridgecrest, California, otherwise known as the “Gateway to Death Valley”, and home of the China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station (it was just NOTS, then NWC, when I was there). While at China Lake I was a member of the China Lake Astronomical Society, the folks who helped give me a start in Astronomy, and Boy Scout Troop 35, to whom I owe my abiding love of the outdoors. In 1979 I left the desert to attend Caltech, where I received my BS in Physics in 1983. At Caltech I was a member of Dabney House, and a sometime member of the infamous InfraRed Army. After graduating I headed north up the coast to UC Santa Cruz, where I received my PhD in Astronomy & Astrophysics in 1988. After a year at the University of Texas at Austin as a McDonald Fellow, I arrived at The Ohio State University as a postdoc in 1989, eventually joining the faculty of the Astronomy Department in 1992 as an Assistant Professor. I have been a Full Professor of Astronomy at OSU since 2003. In 2021 I was named a College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Astronomy.
My primary research is concerned with the astrophysics of active galactic nuclei and gaseous nebulae as revealed through imaging and spectrophotometry at optical, UV, and infrared wavelengths with ground-based and space-based telescopes. I’ve been concerned with three lines of research. The first seeks to refine measurments of the masses of supermassive black holes in nearby active galaxies with the goal of calibrating the key scaling relations that will allow us to extend local methods out to cosmological distances. The second uses the Hubble and Chandra space telescopes to study how local active nuclei are fed by gas from their host galaxies, and how that activity in turn feeds back upon their hosts. The third is to use precision spectrophotometry to measure direct and empirical elemental gas-phase abundances in star formation regions to trace the chemical evolution history of galaxies across cosmic time.
Closer to home, I have been active in the study of planets around other stars, in particular as part of the MicroFUN collaboration based at Ohio State that organized a worldwide network of amateur and professional astronomers to make coordinated observations to search for extrasolar planetary systems using gravitational microlensing. My current and past students and I are also engaged searches for and detailed follow-up studies of up transiting exoplanets, through the KELT North, KELT South, and DEMONEXT projects, as well as exploring new techniques using adaptive optics.
Research requires the best data, and to provide that data I have spent much of my career on the design and construction of advanced astronomical instruments, including development of software for image processing, spectral analysis, and instrument control and data acquisition. Instruments I have helped build are in regular use at the MDM Observatory in Arizona and at the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) on Mt. Graham in Arizona. My biggest project to date has been the two Multi-Object Double Spectrographs (MODS) we built at OSU for the LBT. I am currently leading the development of two robotic fiber positioner systems for SDSS-V. During 2019-2021 I served on the National Academy of Sciences Astro2020 Decadal Survey panel on Optical and Infrared Observations from the Ground.