• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI)

  • / science /
    • science overview
    • cosmology and dark energy
    • redshifts and distance
    • mapping the universe
    • the DESI science mission
    • the DESI survey
    • imaging surveys
  • / instrument /
    • instrument overview
    • telescope
      • tohono o’odham
    • corrector
    • focal plane system
    • fiber system
    • spectrograph
    • instrument control system
    • data systems
    • bringing DESI to life
      • commissioning Instrument
      • protoDESI
  • / collaboration /
    • DESI team
    • DESI builders
    • collaborating institutions
    • sponsors
    • code of conduct
    • vendors
    • collaboration policies
  • / press /
    • announcements
    • in the news
    • press releases
    • tweets by desisurvey
    • blog
    • acknowledgments
  • / galleries /
    • videos
    • image gallery
  • / for scientists /
    • data releases
    • instrument design
    • imaging data
    • target selection and survey validation
    • theory and simulations
    • other DESI science
    • key publications
    • all DESI papers
    • team login
    • request a DESI speaker
    • internal
  • / education & outreach /
    • meet a DESI member
    • blog
    • planetarium show
    • DESI high
    • interactive visualizations
    • DESI Merch

Steve Kent

June 7, 2019 by


What is your position or role in the DESI project?
I am a senior scientist at Fermilab. I am responsible for a program called “PlateMaker” that is part of the instrument control system.

Where were you born?
I was born in the town of West Orange, New Jersey, where Thomas Edison had his laboratory and built the first movie studio.

Where do you live now?
I live in the town of Geneva, Illinois, close to Fermilab. It is a scenic town with many shops, restaurants, bike trails, and an authentic Dutch windmill.

What do you do as part of DESI?
The PlateMaker program maps the positions of galaxies on the sky to the DESI focal plane and tells the fiber positioners where to move. Because the DESI corrector introduces a large amount of distortion, the mapping requires understanding the corrector properties to high accuracy. While the corrector was being fabricated, I was part of the optics team, evaluating the impact of things like glass homogeneity and polishing errors on our eventual ability to accurately position the fibers.

What is the most interesting or exciting thing about DESI?
You never know where your work will lead you. In order to model distortion patterns in the corrector, I developed some new mathematical techniques that turned out to be similar to those used to analyze the microwave background polarization and gravity waves. I wrote this up as a journal paper, and it is the second paper to be published by the DESI collaboration.

What do you do for fun?
I enjoy hiking, “peak-bagging,” and other outdoor activities. I also spent time trying to predict the location of where Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared (not yet found).

Filed Under: meet a DESI member

Primary Sidebar

meet more members

  • Jamie McCullough
  • Ting Li
  • Agne Semenaite
  • Julian Bautista
  • Boryana Hadzhiyska
  • Anna Porredon
  • Hernan Rincon
  • Umut Demirbozan
  • Bernardita Ried Guachalla
  • Peter Clark
  • Siwei Zou
  • John Suárez-Pérez
  • Namitha Kizhuprakkat
  • Hermine Wilman-Landt
  • Shaun Cole
  • Arnaud De Mattia
  • Dillon Brout
  • Ting-Yun Cheng (Sunny)
  • Alexie Leauthaud
  • Alex Krolewski
  • Juan Garcia Bellido
  • David Kirkby
  • Allyson Brodzeller
  • Lado Samushia
  • Christoph Saulder
  • Paul Martini
  • Sandy Yuan
  • Vaisakh Rajeev
  • Hector Gil Marín
  • Zack Slepian
  • Rongpu Zhou
  • Fei Qin
  • Mehdi Rezaie
  • Rossana Ruggeri
  • Ben Weaver
  • Hee-Jong Seo
  • Andreu Font-Ribera
  • Joe DeRose
  • Mariana Vargas Magaña
  • Angela Berti
  • Abby Bault
  • Adam Myers
  • Jesse Golden-Marx
  • Patrick Dunlop
  • Elise Darragh-Ford
  • Minji Oh
  • Jessica Harris
  • Boris Gaensicke
  • Victoria Fawcett
  • Kevin Fanning
  • Lehman Garrison
  • Hanyu Zhang
  • Omar A. Ruiz Macias
  • Seshadri Nadathur
  • Ignasi Pérez i Ràfols
  • Santiago Serrano Elorduy
  • Biprateep Dey
  • Claire Lamman
  • Kyle Dawson
  • Eddie Schlafly
  • Otger Ballester
  • Aaron Meisner
  • Antonella Palmese
  • Andrea Muñoz Gutiérrez
  • David Sprayberry
  • Dustin Lang
  • Tamara Davis
  • Jahmour Givans
  • John Moustakas
  • Pauline Zarrouk
  • Hu Zou
  • Christian Soto
  • Sarah E.
  • Duan Yutong
  • Michael Wilson
  • Tammie Lavoie
  • James Farr
  • Steve Kent
  • Srivatsan Sridhar
  • Jessica Aguilar
  • Alma Xochitl Gonzalez Morales
  • Charles-Antoine Claveau
  • Christopher Manser
  • Richard Joyce
  • Tami Blackwell
  • Yu-Ling Chang

Footer

TEAM LOGIN

twitter   instagram   facebook

Copyright © 2018 Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument [DESI]

Copyright © 2025 · Parallax Pro DESI on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in