Senate Faculty

Profile_pic2.jpg

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

Astro logo

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.

More

Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array

Hera331_bpers

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

More