Dr. Tim S. Axelrod

Tim S. Axelrod, Ph.D. is the Data Management Project Scientist for LSST, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. Tim is discoverer of the first occultation of a star by a black hole.
 
Tim earned his BS in Physics from Caltech in 1969, an MS in Applied Physics from Stanford in 1971, and his PhD in Physics and Astronomy from UC Santa Cruz in 1980. As a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Lab he was involved in a wide variety of computational physics problems, and turned his attention to data intensive astronomy projects in 1987.
 
After designing and implementing the data processing for a highly parallel satellite tracking system, he went on to key data architect roles in TAOS, an asteroid occultation survey; MACHO, a search for dark matter through microlensing; LBT, the Large Binocular Telescope; and now LSST. MACHO was one of the first optical astronomy projects that was possible only with large scale databases and computing, and that tradition of pushing the edge of data technology for astronomy is now epitomized by LSST.
 
Tim’s papers include Airborne spectrophotometry of SN 1987A from 1.7 to 12.6 microns-Time history of the dust continuum and line emission, Gravitational microlensing as a method of detecting disk dark matter and faint disk stars, A Proper Motion Survey for White Dwarfs with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, LSST Science Book, Version 2.0, Statistical Methods for Detecting Stellar Occultations by Kuiper Belt Objects: the Taiwanese-American Occultation Survey, The Proper Motion of the Large Magellanic Cloud using HST, and The MACHO Data Pipeline.
 
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