Adam Bolton

Stay at the IAC: 04/05/2014 to 17/5/2014 and 15/06/2014 to 05/07/2014

Research line: Stellar and Interstellar Physics

Dr. Bolton will give a Severo Ochoa seminar at the IAC on July 1st 2014, entitled The Hierarchical Bayesian Approach to Galaxy Demographics.

Adam Bolton is a member of the faculty of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City (U.S.A.).

He received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and held postdoctoral fellowships at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Hawaii.

Dr. Bolton's primary research interests are in cosmology and galaxy evolution. His current work focuses on using massive spectroscopic redshift surveys together with new algorithmic and statistical methods to unify and optimize the study of dark energy and galaxy demographics within a single experimental framework. He also mines redshift survey data sets to discover large samples of strong gravitational lenses, which can be confirmed by high-resolution follow-up imaging, and used to study the interaction between luminous and dark matter in massive galaxies. Dr. Bolton currently serves as Principal Data Scientist for the SDSS-IV collaboration, and works directly on the BOSS, eBOSS, and DESI redshift survey projects.

During his visit he collaborated with part of the team working of one of the technological projects supported by the Severo Ochoa program: WEAVE. He helped the team working on the WEAVE Advanced Processing System (the software for the automated analysis of WEAVE spectra) to define the requirements for the system, and adapt the pipeline from the BOSS survey for WEAVE. Bolton collaborated as well with C. Allende Prieto on the design of stellar model libraries for use in BOSS and DESI, and had useful meetings with a number of staff members and postdoc fellows at the IAC.