Senate Faculty

Aaron Parsons

Associate Professor of Astronomy; RAL Director; Equity and Diversity Officer;

Office:
455 Campbell Hall

Contact:
E:aparsons@astro.berkeley.edu

Specialty areas

radio-astronomy-instrumentation-cosmic-reionization-digital-signal-processing-experimental-cosmology-formation-and-evolution-of-large-scale-cosmic-structure-baryon-acoustic-oscillations-and-dark.

Biography

I am currently an Associate Professor in the Astronomy Department and director of the UC Berkeley Radio Astronomy Laboratory. I received an A.S. from Colorado Northwestern Community College in 1998 while in high school, and a B.A. from Harvard in 2002 in physics and mathematics working with Paul Horowitz. I worked as a development engineer at the Space Sciences Laboratory from 2002 to 2004 with Dan Werthimer. I received my Ph.D. in 2009 from UC Berkeley working with Don Backer, spending the years from 2007 to 2009 as a predoctoral researcher at Arecibo Observatory. I spent two years as an NSF postdoctoral fellow and honorary Charles Townes fellow at UC Berkeley before joining the faculty here at Berkeley in 2011.

Projects

HYPERION

Lead:Aaron Parsons

The Hydrogen Probe of the Epoch of Reionization (HYPERION) is a specialized low-frequency interferometer to study the Epoch of Reionization through the spatial monopole of the 21cm brightness temperature of neutral hydrogen as a function of redshift (i.e. the ''global signal"). The goal of HYPERION is to detect the monopole reionization signal. A detection of this signal could give key insights into the physics and development of our early universe, including information on the formation of the first stars and galaxies.

Lead:Aaron Parsons

The Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) is a focussed experiment to detect and characterize the signature of the Epoch of Reionization by observing highly red-shifted neutral hydrogen