Users Committee

About the Rubin Users Committee

Introduction: The 12-person Rubin Users Committee stands throughout Rubin Observatory’s commissioning and operations phases. The committee is charged with soliciting feedback from the science community and recommending science-driven improvements to the LSST data products and the Rubin Science Platform tools and services. This committee reports every six months to the Rubin Lead Community Scientist and to the Rubin Observatory Director. The full charge to the Users Committee can be found at rdo-051.lsst.io.

Meetings and reports: Meetings of the Users Committee begin with a 'listening session', and all members of the Rubin community are welcome to attend and raise issues for UC discussion. A meeting calendar is posted below. Meeting announcements, connection info, and the twice-yearly reports (with responses from Rubin leadership) are all available in the Rubin Community Forum (link to all Forum topics with the users-committee tag).

Contact: The Users Committee is open to suggestions and feedback from the Rubin community. Users Committee members can be contacted individually via direct message in the Rubin Community Forum, or all together by sending a direct message to the Rubin Community Forum group @Users-Committee or an email to RubinObs-Users-Committee@lists.lsst.org.

Chair: Igor Andreoni

Current Members

Igor Andreoni (he/him) – Neil Gehrels postdoctoral fellow at Joint Space-Science Institute (University of Maryland and NASA/Goddard). Expert in multi-messenger and time-domain astronomy. He is a member of the Zwicky Transient Facility collaboration and the Rubin LSST TVS collaboration.

Dominique Boutigny (he/him) – Staff Physicist at CNRS/IN2P3 Laboratoire d’Annecy de Physique des Particules (LAPP) in France. Science interest in Cosmology with Galaxy Clusters - Technical interest in image processing and large data processing infrastructures. Scientific Coordinator of Rubin data processing in France. Member of DESC.

Alessandra Corsi (she/her) – Associate Professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department at Texas Tech University. Her research focuses on multi-messenger time-domain astronomy, with emphasis on gamma-ray bursts, core-collapse supernovae, and binary neutron star mergers. Her expertise is on radio follow-up observations of these explosive transients, and associated gravitational wave data analyses. She is a member of the Rubin LSST TVS collaboration, and a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration.

Matthew Holman (he/him) – Senior Astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA; Lecturer at Harvard University. Former Director of the Minor Planet Center. Experience in solar system dynamics, algorithm development, surveys for small bodies in the solar system, searches for and characterization of exoplanets. Member of the SSSC.

Anupreeta More (she/her) – Staff scientist at the Inter-University Centre of Astronomy and Astrophysics. Her research focuses on gravitational lensing, gravitational waves and multi-messenger science with lensed transients. Her technical expertise is in developing search (machine learning and otherwise) algorithms for lensed electromagnetic and gravitational wave sources; generating realistic mock simulations and conducting mock data challenges. She is one of the PIs of Space Warps, a citizen science project to discover lenses. She is a member of the Rubin LSST - DESC, SLSC, SLSC Ethics panel as well as a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration.

Alejandra Muñoz Arancibia (she/her) – ALeRCE Data Scientist at the Millennium Institute of Astrophysics (MAS), hosted at the Center for Mathematical Modeling (CMM), Chile. Experience in cosmological simulations of galaxy formation and evolution, models and observations of dusty star-forming galaxies, and data analysis of transients and variables in general. Member of the ALeRCE alert broker, DESC, and ISSC.

Vincenzo Petrecca (he/him) – PhD student at University of Napoli "Federico II", Italy. His research focuses on time domain astronomy, particularly on AGN optical variability and Supernovae. Experience in time series analysis (both in time and frequency domain), photometric classification, and rate measurements of transient sources. He is a member of DESC, TVS and AGN Science Collaborations.

Vicki Sarajedini (she/her) – Professor at the Florida Atlantic University. She conducts multi wavelength studies of AGN to better understand the connection between accreting supermassive black holes and their host galaxies. She works with time domain ground and space-based surveys to study AGN variability and explore correlations between AGN light curves and other properties such as accretion rate and black hole mass. She is currently a member of the LSST AGN Science Collaboration.

Darryl Seligman (he/him) – Assistant Professor at Michigan State University Department of Physics and Astronomy. Experience in small bodies in the Solar System including interstellar objects and dark comets, nonlinear dynamics, MHD and fluid dynamics.

Anja von der Linden (she/her) – Assistant Professor at Stony Brook University, NY, USA. Science expertise in cosmology with galaxy clusters and weak lensing. Technical experience includes data processing, photometric calibration, photometric redshifts, weak-lensing shape measurements, Bayesian inference techniques. Member of DESC.

Matthew P. Wiesner (he/him) – Assistant Professor of physics at Benedictine University in Lisle, Illinois. Scientific interests in gravitational lensing and searches for kilonovae associated with LIGO/Virgo alerts. Involved with DESC data challenges, including adding kilonovae to a subset of DC2 data. Member of DESC, SSSC, SLSC and GSC.

Michael Wood-Vasey (he/him) – Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Science focus on supernova cosmology. Technical interests in large-survey image processing, image subtraction, and data-intensive astronomical analysis. Member of DESC and TVS.

Meetings

Meetings of the Users Committee begin with a 'listening session', and all members of the Rubin community are welcome to attend and raise issues for UC discussion.

Slides

These slides are kept up-to-date and made available to be linked into other slide decks.