Dick Plambeck

Research Interests

I work in the field of millimeter wavelength astronomy.  I like to build new instrumentation, then push that instrumentation to its limits in order to see new things.  I helped to develop the Berkeley-Illinois-Maryland Array (BIMA) and the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter Astronomy (CARMA), two pioneering mm-wavelength aperture synthesis telescopes.  The success of those telescopes led ultimately to the construction of ALMA,  the world's premier telescope at mm wavelengths.    Currently I'm analyzing ALMA data (of Orion, my favorite source), participating in observations with the Event Horizon Telescope (a VLBI experiment that will image the event horizon of the black hole in the center of our galaxy), and helping test instrumentation for PolarBear (an experiment to measure the B-mode polarization of the cosmic background radiation).

Biography

S.B, Physics, MIT, 1971

PhD., Physics, U.C. Berkeley, 1978