Users Committee

About: The Rubin Users Committee (UC) is charged with assessing the scientific utility of the Rubin data products and Science Platform, and reporting their findings in twice-yearly reports to the Rubin Operations director. UC charge document.

Meetings and reports: Meetings of the UC 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 are available in the Rubin Community Forum as topics with the users-committee tag.

Contact: The UC encourages feedback from the Rubin community, and can be contacted via direct message to the @Users-Committee group in the Rubin Community Forum or by email to RubinObs-Users-Committee@lists.lsst.org.

Current Members

Chair: Vincenzo Petrecca

James Freeburn (he/him) is a Postdoctoral researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He works in time domain astronomy, primarily on identification and multi-wavelength follow-up of fast optical transients including GRB afterglows and kilonovae. He is a member of Rubin's Transients and Variable Stars collaboration.

Sugata Kaviraj () - TBD

Fatoumata Kebe () - TBD

Mike Kelley (he/him) - Principal Research Scientist at the University of Maryland, College Park. He studies small solar system objects, especially cometary activity, outbursts, surfaces, and dust properties. He is a member of the Solar System Science Collaboration.

Surhud More () - TBD

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.

Ryan Oelkers (he/him) - Assistant Professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. His research focuses on exoplanet detection and demographics, ground-based instrumentation, and the analysis of large-scale photometric data. Prior to joining the faculty at UTRGV, he spent two years in industry as a data scientist, and he was member of the targeting teams for TESS and APOGEE-2N.

Vincenzo Petrecca (he/him) – Postdoctoral researcher at INAF-Observatory of Capodimonte, 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.

Elham Saremi (she/her) is a Research Fellow at the University of Southampton, UK, working on the development of the LSST–VISTA Fusion pipeline. Her work focuses on integrating near-infrared observations from VISTA with optical data from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, enabling combined multiwavelength imaging and catalogues for scientific analysis. Her research interests include galaxy evolution, with a particular focus on low-surface-brightness structures, dwarf galaxies, and faint galaxy outskirts in the near-infrared. She is a member of three Rubin LSST Science Collaborations: Galaxies; Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN); and Stars, Milky Way, and Local Volume.

Argyro Sasli (she/her) – Research Scientist at the University of Minnesota, School of Physics and Astronomy, USA. Her research spans time-domain astronomy, gravitational-wave astrophysics, and machine learning, with experience in multimodal transient classification, anomaly detection, alert brokering, and uncertainty quantification for large surveys. She is lead developer of the AppleCiDEr multimodal transient classifier, chairs the ZTF machine learning subgroup, and co-chairs the real-real classification group of Roman STRIDE.

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.

Charlotte Ward (she/her) - Assistant Professor at the Pennsylvania State University with a science focus on AGN, tidal disruption events, and lensed supernovae and technical interests in joint pixel analysis of Rubin and overlapping space-based surveys. Member of DESC and the AGN SC.

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.

Past members

Igor Andreoni, Dominique Boutigny, Matthew Holman, Anupreeta More, Vicki Sarajedini, Anja von der Linden, Matthew P. Wiesner, Alessandra Corsi, Francisco Javier Sanchez Lopez, Markus Rabus, Qingling Ni, V. Ashley Villar

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.