As of August 2013, I am the Caltech Observatories Research astronomer. From 2010 to 2012 I was a senior postdoctoral scholar working on the SED Machine. Prior to my work on SED Machine, I was a postdoctoral scholar working on the MOSFIRE spectrograph for the mighty Keck Telescope.
My Ph.D. work was supervised by Professor David Koo at Lick Observatory. For fun, I tracked down my academic genealogy from the Berkeley “Badgrads” wiki: N.P. Konidaris (2009) → D.C. Koo (1981) → I.R. King (1952) → H. Shapley (1913) → H.N. Russell (1900) → C.A. Young (no Ph.D.). I’m very fond of Young’s 7-prism spectrograph (figure from Young, “Spectroscopic notes”, 1870):
In the future, I anticipate working on observations enabled by new instruments. I’m particularly excited to be part of the Thirty-Meter Telescope project, but I’m interested in using telescopes with diameters that range from 30-mm to 30-m.
Contact Information
- Office: Cahill
- Email: npk@astro.caltech.edu
- Address: Caltech 249-17, Pasadena, CA 91125
- Phone: 626-395-3293 or 831-704-6425
