About Me

Education:
B.S. in Astrophysics from Caltech in 2008

PhD in Physics and Astronomy from UPenn in 2016

Research Interests: Experimental cosmology, astrophysical instrumentation, data analysis, polarimetry, cosmic microwave background, interstellar medium, dust, cryogenics, balloon-borne telescopes

Publications: ADS List
Google Scholar

Research

SO small aperture telescope at sunset

The Simons Observatory
I am an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin working on the Simons Observatory (SO), a set of cosmic microwave background telescopes operating since 2023 from the SO site in the Chilean Atacama Desert. I was previosuly a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California San Diego where I spent six years designing, building, and testing the SO small aperture telescopes. To find out more visit SimonsObservatory.org

BLAST-TNG preparing for launch in Antarctica, Dec. 2018

BLAST-TNG
My graduate work centered on the Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST) which observes the polarized dust emission from the Milky Way's interstellar medium. The dust emission contains a wealth of information about our galaxy's composition and magnetic field while also being an important foreground source for CMB observations. To learn more about BLAST visit Northwestern.edu/BLAST or follow the BLAST-TNG twitter at @BLAST_TNG . We are currently working on the next iteration of the project, dubbed BLAST Observatory, which is planned to be a slightly smaller instrument capable of observing at higher frequencies with a longer flight duration utilization NASA super-pressure balloons.

Part of the SO team and myself at the site.

Useful Links

Here area a few links that I think will be useful for people interested in learning more about my research or who may be joining my lab. The list is not exhaustive and will be updated periodically as I remember or stumble upon more useful resources.

2021 CMB Summer School is a fantastic collection of jupyter notebooks presented in a sequenced manner to walk people through the CMB data analysis steps (SummerSChool github direct link ).

As part of the summer school, there was a link to a tool, CAMB, on the NASA Lambda site that allowed people to play with fundamental cosmology properties and observe the impact on the angular power spectra. That tool seems to have been removed, however, I think this Paper and this Code Repository provide the necessary materials for someone to replicate the tool and play with some power spectra. More recently a graduate student at UTAustin has developed a new visualization which provides a similar look at power spectra, CMBverse

To learn more about the experimental aspect of CMB research, check out the presentations from the 2022 Chicago Summer School .

The SO Large Aperture Telescope.

Outreach and Media

I participate in a number of education and public outreach activities including public talks, science fair demos, panels, and public observing nights. More details can be found in my CV or by following me on social media. Here are a few select highlights:

There are several articles focused on SO including some of the aspects I work with: Bluefors SO article
Simons Foundation article
UT Austin article

I was featured in a UCSD article based on my outreach activities, Link

You can find an interview of me as well as videos from around the lab on the Simons Observatory Youtube channel, Link

Contact

Email: ngalitzki@utexas.edu

Address: 2515 Speedway, Austin, TX 78712