Biographical Sketch:
Brian Koopman is an Associate Research Scientist at Yale’s Wright Lab, who works with Laura Newburgh on the Simons Observatory, which is a new Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) observatory that is currently being built in Chile. There will be four telescopes in total. His focus is on developing the data acquisition software that will coordinate data collection among all the various systems within the observatory. He leads the group that is developing near real time data quality checks, to make sure the telescopes are operating nominally. In addition, he is working in similar roles on the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), and CMB-S4, which are previous and next generation CMB experiments, respectively.
Brian is a talented musician as well, having played saxophone for over 20 years. He is also in a band, - ¡Viva Mayhem!
In addition, he has built his own computers for the past decade.
Research:
Brian works in the Newburgh Lab at Yale, mostly on the Simons Observatory (SO). The science goals and instrument details have been detailed in several papers. His research focuses on development of data acquisition and control systems for the telescope as well as subsystem hardware development.
Previously, he worked in the Niemack Lab at Cornell mostly on the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT). His research focused on polarization calibration of the ACT detectors, detector testing for future CMB telescopes, analysis of ACT data, and building tools for monitoring/controlling/organizing site operations on ACT, the details of which can be found in his thesis.
Education:
Ph.D., Cornell University, 2018
Honors & Awards:
Selected Publications:
