jsuarez

 

What is your position or role in the DESI project?
I am the DESI Project Safety Officer

Where were you born?
I was born and raised in Luanda, Angola, West Africa

Where do you live now?
I live 15 min from Berkeley Lab.

What do you do as part of DESI?
At Berkeley Lab, I support scientists and projects including DESI with focus on the implementation of an effective personnel and equipment safety program as well as environmental protection. For DESI, this program is integrated into the overall management and execution of the project at all phases; planning, design, prototyping, construction, assembly and test, commissioning. This requires understanding the system and its vulnerabilities to minimize hazard risk. This is accomplished by working closely with the scientists and engineering teams as well as the staff executing the work onsite.

What is the most interesting or exciting thing about your job?
I find it very satisfying to use the skills I honed throughout my career to support the scientists at Berkeley Lab be successful

Any advice for an aspiring scientist?
I have three pieces of advice: follow your passion, set a vision for your future, and be persistent towards achieving your goals.

What do you do for fun? I
Love climbing ice, granite, carving turns in powder and roaming in the high mountains.

 

If you weren’t a scientist, what would be your dream job?
I made the transition from being a scientist to working in Industry and now working at a
National Lab.

 

What excites/interests you most about DESI?
As a physicist it is very exciting to support DESI answer some of the most fundamental questions in cosmology.

 

What is your position or role in the DESI project?
I am a second year PhD student at IFAE (Barcelona), working in the Lyman-alpha forest group of DESI.

Where were you born?
I was born in Madrid, Spain.

Where do you live now?
I currently live in Barcelona, Spain.

What do you do as part of DESI?
So far, I have been working on improving the Lyman-alpha forest mocks used for the BAO (Baryon Acoustic Oscillation) analysis validation. My work has focused on making both the mocks and the validation pipeline more realistic, ensuring they better resemble the data.

What is the most interesting or exciting thing about your job?
I find it fascinating that by using phenomena that happened so long ago, such as BAO, we can infer so much information about the universe today. I also love that this is a job where you never stop learning!

Any advice for an aspiring scientist?
Stay curious and keep your sense of wonder. It is easy to get caught up in the routine and forget how amazing it is that we are actually discovering the universe! Also ask every “dumb” question you have, it is how you really end up understanding things (I am still working on this myself!).

What do you do for fun?
I love watching movies, listening to music and reading. I also play piano and sometimes jam with friends, enjoy writing, and of course, spending time with family and friends is always the best.

If you were not a scientist, what would be your dream job?
Probably a mathematician, since I studied mathematics at university and I loved it. But I have wanted to do many different things: be a journalist, a writer, a lawyer, a dancer, a neuroscientist, and many more!

What excites or interests you most about DESI?
I find it very exciting that, by working with DESI, we are able to use new data that no one had access to before, and with it, we might discover things about the universe that we were not even expecting. I also like that we get to do this as part of a collaboration, working alongside other people who share the same passion and goals.

What is your position or role in the DESI project?
I am a postdoctoral researcher in large-scale structure and observational cosmology, and one of the leads for the photometric redshift topical group (more on that below!), and a member of several committees that provide resources to early career researchers and underrepresented groups in science.

Where were you born?
I was born and raised in a suburb near Houston, in Friendswood, Texas – in close proximity to the NASA Johnson Space Center!

Where do you live now?
I live in Princeton, New Jersey.

What do you do as part of DESI?
Among the many incredible things DESI can measure for a galaxy, one we can get with very high precision is the redshift. When electrons in atoms are excited, they absorb and release light at very specific energies that are known from laboratory experiments. In a spectrum, this looks like ‘line’-like features at a given wavelength, and DESI observes many of these at once — telling us about the composition and physics happening inside that galaxy.

We also live in an expanding universe where galaxies are receding away from us very quickly — more quickly with greater distances. Those known atomic transition features in light from a galaxy get pulled to redder wavelengths if they’re moving away from us. Measuring the exact amount of this reddening, redshift, allows us to map galaxy distances and, with enough galaxies, large-scale structure in the universe. In the photometric redshift group, we use these precise distances from DESI to learn more about the distances to galaxies that DESI can’t observe and extend that understanding of large-scale structure to the fainter universe. Part of this includes picking targets to observe that best help us disentangle the relationship between galaxy colors and distance. I work at the intersection of spectroscopic and imaging surveys, pairing these distances with galaxy shapes to learn about our cosmic web.

What is the most interesting or exciting thing about your job?
Observations on this scale are an incredibly powerful probe of cosmology and help us better understand the constituents of our universe. Constraining different models of dark energy and dark matter, learning how the massive structures shaping our reality have evolved over billions of years — it’s all very exciting! With the biggest and most advanced observatories ever constructed coming online it is a fortunate time in history to be a curious person looking up.

Any advice for an aspiring scientist?
I think there is a large pressure on young people to pick a path quickly, at a time when they know the least about that path that they ever will. Especially for people who don’t see themselves represented in science today, this can lead to self-rejection from what might otherwise be an incredible aptitude and curiosity. I would encourage anyone aspiring to work in science to appreciate that everyone starts from knowing nothing, and the only remedy is asking questions and gaining the tools to answer them. The only unteachable skill is curiosity, and the rest you’ll learn in time if you have the initiative.

What do you do for fun?
I really enjoy playing soccer, creating digital art, and writing speculative fiction.

What excites/interests you most about DESI?
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument is the first massively multiplexed spectroscopic telescope, ushering in a wave of others (e.g., 4MOST, PFS). This means that it is capable of observing as many as five thousand galaxies at once. Recent pilot studies have shown that DESI is also capable of observing incredibly faint galaxies as efficiently as much larger telescopes. I’m very excited for the potential of a large faint sample of DESI galaxies, telling us about galaxy evolution, their interactions with one another, and the growth of cosmic structure.

What is your position or role in the DESI project?
I serve as one of the Working Group Chairs for the Milky Way Working Group in DESI.

Where were you born?
I was born in Shanghai, China.

Where do you live now?
I am based at the University of Toronto, so I live in Toronto, Canada.

What do you do as part of DESI?
My journey with DESI began during my postdoctoral position at Fermilab, where I worked on the focus and alignment system—an essential component for DESI’s survey commissioning and operation. I was also involved in DESI’s commissioning and science verification phases. Since the survey officially began, I have primarily contributed to the Milky Way Survey (MWS) and currently chair the MWS Working Group. In the past, I also served on the DESI Publication Board.

What is the most interesting or exciting thing about your job?
Collaborating with people from all over the world, finding opportunities for junior scientists to engage with DESI data, and then seeing their hard work culminate in a published paper a year later—it’s incredibly rewarding!

Any advice for an aspiring scientist?
Reach out to DESI members and ask your questions, especially if you’re new to the collaboration. Everyone is friendly and eager to help, and we’re always looking for people to work on DESI data. Don’t be shy—our collaboration meetings are an excellent place to connect with others and get involved!

What do you do for fun?
I love traveling around the world and trying delicious local cuisines.

If you weren’t a scientist, what would be your dream job?
At one point, I wanted to be a diplomat 🙂

What excites/interests you most about DESI?
The DESI data is revolutionary—not just for cosmology but for astronomy and astrophysics as a whole. I feel that the community is still unaware of its incredible potential because they haven’t had the chance to explore the data yet. I feel my current mission is to promote DESI within the broader astronomy community and help more people discover its amazing possibilities!

What is your position or role in the DESI project?
I am a postdoc, and within DESI, I co-lead the galaxy lensing topical group.
 

Where were you born?
I was born in Vilnius – the capital of Lithuania, which is a small country in Europe, next to the Baltic Sea.
 

Where do you live now?
I currently live in Melbourne, Australia.
 

What do you do as part of DESI?
My involvement in DESI is focused on working towards combining it with photometric weak lensing surveys. The weak lensing surveys measure how much the observed shape of galaxies is bent by the structure (foreground galaxies) that the emitted light travels trough to reach us. DESI is a great probe of such foreground structure and so the two types of measurements are complimentary. In my own research I am most interested in finding ways to consistently perform such combined analyses while making use of the full information of the two point galaxy clustering measurements and meaningfully interpret the resulting cosmological constraints. As a co-lead of the galaxy lensing topical group I am responsible for overseeing the different analyses that test a range of models and assumptions needed for a successful combination of the two different types of observations.
 

What is the most interesting or exciting thing about your job?
I love hearing new perspectives on familiar concepts that deepen my understanding and allow me to see how these concepts fit in the bigger picture in a more cohesive way. I also always appreciate all the creative ways that people solve difficult problems. In any kind of combined analysis one usually needs a lot of expertise and imagination to bring together the separate approaches that might have originally been very different from each other. I am always so impressed by the way my colleagues solve these problems and I am very grateful to be learning from them!
 

Any advice for an aspiring scientist?
My most generic advice is to try and make sure that the choices you make reflect the things you enjoy, whether it is the topic you are passionate about or inspirational people you want to learn from. While there are many frustrating moments in science, it is important that, overall, the process towards completing a research project is in itself interesting and rewarding – and don’t forget to celebrate the little wins along the way! My second piece of advice is to not let the image of what other scientists are like determine what you are supposed to be like to be successful. It is great to get inspiration and guidance but, most importantly, find what works for you.
 

What do you do for fun?
I enjoy going to galleries and concerts, trying out different coffee, exploring new places. I also love swimming and after moving to Melbourne I’ve started learning rowing as well, which has been so much fun and so rewarding!
 

If you weren’t a scientist, what would be your dream job?
I think I might quite enjoy doing a different creative job – I used to write a lot in school and I would love to go back to that. In university I used to work at a coffee shop in an art gallery which combined two of the things that bring me much joy, so perhaps a barista-gallery curator would be another fun occupation!
 

What excites/interests you most about DESI?
The shear size of the dataset is so impressive – comparing it with the previous galaxy surveys and seeing how far we have come from the first clustering observations is truly awesome. The fact that we are also able to model the distribution of all these galaxies and use that to understand our Universe never ceases to blow my mind, it is such an incredible example of what humans can achieve when working together!
 

 

 

What is your position or role in the DESI project?
I am one of the infrastructure contributors in the DESI lensing topical group (part of the c3 working group).

 

Where were you born?
I was born in a city close to Barcelona, Spain.

 

Where do you live now?
I have been moving to several countries in the last few years as a postdoc. I am currently living in Madrid, Spain.

 

What do you do as part of DESI?
In the DESI lensing topical group, I am leading the main 3x2pt LCDM cosmological analysis, in which we will combine projected galaxy clustering from DESI with weak lensing from DES, KiDS, and HSC.

 

What is the most interesting or exciting thing about your job?
It is a privilege (and very exciting) to be able to work with so many talented people on the cosmological exploitation of new high-quality data, such as the DESI catalogs.

 

Any advice for an aspiring scientist?
The most important thing is to have good mentors/advisors and to prioritize your mental health.

 

What do you do for fun?
I am an indoor person. I really enjoy playing video games and reading fantasy books to disconnect and relax.

 

If you weren’t a scientist, what would be your dream job?
I have always liked drawing, and there are some artists in my family, so in another life, I would have tried to focus on that. This was actually one of my hobbies years ago.

 

What excites/interests you most about DESI?
We already have very exciting results just from the first year of observations! I cannot wait to see all the cosmological results that will come out after the DESI observations finish.

 

 

What is your position or role in the DESI project?
I am currently co-chair of one of the working groups in DESI (alongside Rossana Ruggeri) and our job is to oversee projects that are joint between DESI and other experiments of, for example, the cosmic microwave background (CMB, i.e., the oldest light in the Universe) and weak lensing (i.e., the bending of light due to gravity, which induces an apparent change to the shapes of galaxies).

 

Where were you born?
I was born in Sofia, Bulgaria.

 

Where do you live now?
I live in Berkeley, California.

 

What do you do as part of DESI?
I make sure that our main science goals are reached by overseeing the so-called key projects of the collaboration; I analyze data jointly with CMB probes to study the gas distribution and inform weak lensing analysis; I apply galaxy-halo models to the small-scale clustering analysis; I also develop simulation tools on the AbacusSummit suite.

 

What is the most interesting or exciting thing about your job?
The excitement of new discoveries (be it small or big); working towards a common goal with a bunch of great people.

 

Any advice for an aspiring scientist?
Figure out what makes you the happiest work-wise and really try your best to do that.

 

What do you do for fun?
Play the guitar, sing, listen to audiobooks, bike a lot.

 

If you weren’t a scientist, what would be your dream job?
I might work at an NPO, or be a linguist. Something with lots of people-to-people communication.

 

What excites/interests you most about DESI?
The discovery space on small scales; doing things that no one else has done yet (I know this is vague, but this could include new probes, or higher sensitivity that allows us to learn new things about the Universe)

 

 

What is your position or role in the DESI project?
I am one of the infrastructure contributors in the DESI lensing topical group (part of the c3 working group).

 

Where were you born?
I was born in a city close to Barcelona, Spain.

 

Where do you live now?
I have been moving to several countries in the last few years as a postdoc. I am currently living in Madrid, Spain.

 

What do you do as part of DESI?
In the DESI lensing topical group, I am leading the main 3x2pt LCDM cosmological analysis, in which we will combine projected galaxy clustering from DESI with weak lensing from DES, KiDS, and HSC.

 

What is the most interesting or exciting thing about your job?
It is a privilege (and very exciting) to be able to work with so many talented people on the cosmological exploitation of new high-quality data, such as the DESI catalogs.

 

Any advice for an aspiring scientist?
The most important thing is to have good mentors/advisors and to prioritize your mental health.

 

What do you do for fun?
I am an indoor person. I really enjoy playing video games and reading fantasy books to disconnect and relax.

 

If you weren’t a scientist, what would be your dream job?
I have always liked drawing, and there are some artists in my family, so in another life, I would have tried to focus on that. This was actually one of my hobbies years ago.

 

What excites/interests you most about DESI?
We already have very exciting results just from the first year of observations! I cannot wait to see all the cosmological results that will come out after the DESI observations finish.

 

What is your position or role in the DESI project?
I’m a PhD student at the University of Rochester working with my advisors Segev BenZvi and Kelly Douglass. I’m involved with the Galaxy and Quasar Clustering working group and the Alternative Clustering Methods topical group.

 

Where were you born? Where do you live now?
I was born in Corpus Christi, Texas. I’ve also lived in San Antonio, Texas; Syracuse, New York; Cleveland, Ohio; and now, finally, Rochester, New York.

 

What do you do as part of DESI?
I’m creating catalogs of cosmic voids. Voids are large regions of the universe that are tens of millions of lightyears across and have very little matter in them. The number of voids of different sizes that we expect to see is affected by the behavior of dark energy, so we can use voids to learn more about dark energy models. I’m using DESI data to map out where the universe’s cosmic voids are located, with the goal of studying dark energy.

 

What is the most interesting or exciting thing about your job?
I love being able to visualize the universe on its largest size scales. With computer programs, I can illustrate the locations of thousands of voids in the nearby universe, and with DESI’s data, I’ll expand these maps to cover even larger populations of voids at further distances away from us.

 

Any advice for an aspiring scientist?
Have fun exploring a broad range of topics to get a sense of what you love the most and what you might want to do for a career. When you go to college, try to find other students and friends in your science classes who you can work with and learn from. Science degrees can be difficult to get, but having a community of people who are in it together with you helps a lot.

 

What do you do for fun?
I like writing science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories.

 

If you weren’t a scientist, what would be your dream job?
It would be fun to be an author alongside being a scientist.

 

What excites/interests you most about DESI?
I love that DESI is a huge, worldwide collaboration involving novel science, intricate engineering,  in-person collaboration meetings, dedicated science outreach, and fascinating visualizations of survey data. It’s great to be part of such a big project!

What is your position or role in the DESI project?
I am a PhD student and currently contributing to cosmic void projects in DESI, specifically testing and validating the FirstGen simulations and investigating the systematics within them. I have led a similar project in DES, and in DESI, we aim to use DESI Legacy Survey DR9 data to probe high redshift voids and their cross-correlations on the CMB. This will further shed light on CMB lensing or ISW imprints from cosmic voids.

 

Where were you born?
I was born in Istanbul, Turkey. The Asian side of Istanbul, to be specific 🙂

 

What is the most interesting or exciting thing about your job?
Finding something new, previously unknown, albeit small, and contributing to the knowledge of humanity. Sharing these results with others at conferences and hearing their opinions is also a fun part.

 

Any advice for an aspiring scientist?
Science is undoubtedly a collaborative effort and mostly driven by curiosity, so it is important to choose a topic you are very interested in and collaborate with people you would like to work with. This is an important part of the job. You will face many barriers and problems, so it is important to be resilient and solve the problems as they arise.

 

What do you do for fun?
I am an avid hiker and traveler, and I try to hike and travel as much as possible. I particularly enjoy snowboarding and have climbed some 6000-meter peaks in the past. Recently, I have become interested in sailing as well. In addition, I enjoy drone photography and wildlife photography, and I have been to Africa a few times.

 

If you weren’t a scientist, what would be your dream job?
In the past, I considered being a guitarist, to be honest! But I was very interested in science, particularly physics and astronomy, so I decided to pursue science. I think I would be a good entrepreneur as well, as I always come up with new ideas.

 

What excites/interests you most about DESI?
I think DESI’s ability to measure the dark energy equation of state excites most of us, including me. The fact that it has significant potential to indicate new physics or validate our current cosmological model is a great excitement for many of us.

What is your position or role in the DESI project?
I am one of the early career scientists using the data from DESI and other telescopes to derive interesting results about our Universe!

 

Where were you born?
Santiago, Chile

 

Where do you live now?
California, USA

 

What do you do as part of DESI?
I am currently leading one of the kinematic Sunyaev Zel’dovich measurements using DESI galaxies and the Cosmic Microwave Background map from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope.

Galaxies have a gaseous halo surrounding them, which is challenging to observe. Creative and prolific scientists like Rashid Sunyaev and Yakov B. Zeldovich suggested that it is possible to see it by studying the effect this produces in a background light. There is a perfect candidate to be this background, which is the Cosmic Microwave Background. This is a relic and smooth source of light at microwave frequencies, emitted when the Universe was 380,000 years old! A way of visualizing this effect is to think of galaxies as part of a shadow theater, where the Cosmic Microwave Background illuminates the scenario from the back. There is an additional thing to mention: if these galaxies were steady, this effect would not be as powerful as it could be. Luckily, galaxies have what we call “peculiar velocities”, meaning they move on top of the expansion of the Universe. When combining the velocities of galaxies and the  Cosmic Microwave Background, we can study the gas of galaxies. This is the kinematic Sunyaev Zel’dovich effect!

 

What is the most interesting or exciting thing about your job?
What I found extremely interesting from my job as a graduate student is that my meetings are about discussing fundamental physics and ideas of the Universe, as I always dreamed of.

 

Any advice for an aspiring scientist?
To aspiring scientists I would recommend them to learn English as much as they can in their earlier careers. As a non-native speaker I have been on multiple occasions in which I do not understand what people are asking/answering. I also want to tell them it is okay to ask if something is not clear!

 

What do you do for fun?
I like taking analog pictures and developing them in a darkroom. I also love doing scientific outreach and using social media to spread scientific knowledge.

 

If you weren’t a scientist, what would be your dream job?
I would have loved to be an actress or a philosopher.

 

What excites/interests you most about DESI?
It is incredible to think how many galaxies it has detected in such a short time! The first results are already astonishing. I am so impressed we can see so deep into the past of our Universe just by looking from Earth.

What is your position or role in the DESI project?
I’m a postdoctoral research fellow working on finding and studying the long-term properties of tidal disruption events. You can think of this as listening for the echoing screams of a star being torn apart by a black hole it has had the misfortune of drifting too close to! In reality it’s about finding the specific pattern of light these events leave in the spectrum of the galaxy in which they happen. As part of this work, I’m a member of the ‘Transients and Low-Redshift Cosmology’ and ‘Galaxy and Quasar Physics’ working groups and am co-lead of the QSO/AGN Topical Group, helping to co-ordinate broader work looking into what the supermassive black holes at the centre of galaxies get up to.

 

Where were you born?
I was born in the Northern Irish town of Ballymena and whilst I might have left, I carry the accent with me.

 

Where do you live now?
I currently live in Portsmouth on the south coast of England close to the University of Portsmouth where I’m part of the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation.

 

What do you do as part of DESI?
My day-to-day is a mixture of different things. It can be looking through the spectra of galaxies that might contain the signature of an ongoing tidal disruption event to discover and classify new events. I might also use DESI data to follow-up on existing events to see how they have evolved and what that can tell us about them. I also do a lot of computer coding to search for the most interesting objects -with the millions of spectra DESI gathers no one can look through them all! – and to process the data to learn as much as possible both from individual objects and what they can reveal as a group.

As a Topical Group co-ordinator, I also have a role in making sure those of us working on supermassive black holes are aware of what is being worked on by others in DESI so we can learn from each other and move forward as efficiently as possible.

 

What is the most interesting or exciting thing about your job?
As the objects I investigate are so far off into the universe, it takes their light a very, very long time to reach us here on Earth. So, in a way it’s like using a time machine, as what DESI picks up from the galaxy ‘now’ is from a time long before dinosaurs roamed the Earth. As my research focuses on individual events, what they can tell us about the galaxies they occurred in and the physical processes that drive some of the most extreme events in the universe, it’s like being a time traveling accident investigator which I think is pretty cool.

 

What excites/interests you most about DESI?
DESI is collecting a truly monumental amount of data, with spectra for millions of galaxies. With a dataset like this we are able to learn a lot more about the rarest types of galaxy, performing studies that just aren’t possible using the small numbers of such objects that have been discovered by chance up to this point. It also goes without saying that with so many galaxies being explored, we are bound to discover things we didn’t even know to look for!

 

Any advice for an aspiring scientist?
I think my two pieces of advice would be:

1) Get as much experience with computer coding as you can. Science and coding are very tightly linked and the more experience you have the easier you will find it to take on new problems. It’s also not as daunting to learn as you might think, and the satisfaction of getting a new piece of code working makes all the challenges worth it.

2) Believe in yourself – there isn’t one path to success. If you have a goal in mind there can be multiple ways to get there and feel free to reach out to people in the field, I’m sure they will be happy to offer advice and support.

 

What do you do for fun?
I’m an avid RPG and strategy gamer with ‘Starfield’ and ‘Stellaris’ being a couple of my go-to’s, with Pokémon having a strong grip on me as well. I find spending time with my friends at a local pub or restaurant is an excellent way to unwind after a busy week. There is also little better than curling up with a cup of tea and watching a good movie or TV program – ‘House of the Dragon’ and ‘The Traitors’ being my current favourites.

 

If you weren’t a scientist, what would be your dream job?
Now that’s a tough one. Being an astronomer has been my dream job since I was about four years old so I’d have to go with a veterinarian.

What is your position or role in the DESI project?
I am the co-leads of the absorber topical group and used to serve on the Early-Career-Scientists committee.

 

Where were you born?
I was born in Hunan, China.

 

Where do you live now?
I live in Beijing now.

 

What is the most interesting or exciting thing about your job?
Always seek new knowledge, identify new objects, and interpret their originality.

 

What do you do as part of DESI?
As the co-leads of the absorber topical group, I help coordinate related science projects and strengthen communication between the quasar-galaxy physics working group and the Lya working group. As a researcher, I worked on quasar and galaxy science projects, analyzed DESI data, and contributed to DESI’s observation and outreach activities (please see the DESI planetarium film)!

 

Any advice for an aspiring scientist?
Stay curious and chat with people in all fields.

 

What do you do for fun?
Sports, music (playing the Erhu, a Chinese classical instrument, and having limited skills on the guitar 🙂 and traveling.

 

If you weren’t a scientist, what would be your dream job?
Astronaut or architect.

 

What excites/interests you most about DESI?
Mapping the universe with the most details (especially stars and galaxies!)