Meet the SCExAO team

 

Local team at Subaru Telescope

SCExAO is the brainchild of Prof. Olivier Guyon, an astronomer who is passionate and has been devoted to the field of high contrast imaging for the past decade. Olivier is the PI of the instrument and is heavily involved with the low level software and system architecture implementation amongst many other aspects. Olivier Guyon was awarded the MacArthur fellowship in 2012 for the invention of the PIAA coronagraph. Olivier splits his time between Subaru, The University of Arizona and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratories. Olivier Guyon
Dr. Julien Lozi is a postdoc who joined the SCExAO project from October 2014. He returns to the group after a 6-month internship for his Master's thesis in 2008 (see below). Julien is in charge of maintaining and upgrading the hardware inside the instrument, as well as Python interfaces aimed at optimizing observations and collaborations. His area of interest is wavefront sensing, vibration corrections and instrumental characterizations. Julien Lozi
Dr. Sebastien Vievard is a postdoc who joined the SCExAO project from March 2018. He returns to the group after his productive visit as an undergraduate student in 2013 (see below). Sebastian works on the operation, upgrade and data analysis of the FIRST instrument. He is also involved in activities with the IRD (InfraRed Doppler Spectrometer) instrument (operation, hardware maintenance and fiber injection optimization for the REACH project). Sebastien is also involved in activities for Wavefront Sensing and Control. Sebastien Vievard
Dr. Vincent Deo is a postdoc who joined the SCExAO project from March 2020. His main area of interest is adaptive optics, with a strong focus on novel wavefront sensing and control techniques. He works on improving the sharpness and contrast delivered by SCExAO through individual and collective optimization of the numerous wavefront control schemes that coexist on SCExAO. Vincent Deo
Dr. Kyohoon Ahn is a postdoc who joined the SCExAO project from January 2021. His main area of interest is adaptive optics. To find the planets like Earth, he supports adaptive optics wavefront sensing and control technology prototyping and validation in close coordination with internal collaborators. He also develops and implements real-time wavefront control on the SCExAO instrument. Kyohoon Ahn
Dr. Tomoyuki Kudo leads the polarimetric differential imaging efforts on SCExAO, and is a core member of the IRD team, which captures high resolution spectra of nearby M-stars and stellar companions. Tomoyuki is based at Subaru Telescope. Kudo
Nour Skaf is a PhD student at LESIA, Observatoire de Paris, PSL Univeristy, since October 2019. She has joined the SCExAO team to focus on adaptive optics wavefront control techniques. Her main work is to develop an algorithm aiming at compensating the non-common path aberrations. She is furthermore involved in disk studies and atmospheric characterisation of exoplanets. She is a visiting PhD student at the University College London. Nour Skaf
 

Active off-site team members

Dr. Frantz Martinache is a founding member of the SCExAO project. Currently he holds a position as a assistant professor at Laboratoire Lagrange Observatoire de la Côte d’AzurFrantz. He was responsible for the design and construction of the first few generations of SCExAO. He pioneered the electrical/signal distribution system for the instrument and wrote the control software to automate the various functions of the instrument. His greatest contribution however, is the development of the speckle nulling routine which promises and order of magnitude reduction on the brightness of the qausi-static speckles around the post coronagraphic PSF. He is currently implementing his focal plane wavefront sensing method which relies on kernel phase analysis to the instrument. Frantz
Dr. Nemanja Jovanovic is a key member of the SCExAO team. Currently he holds a position as a Senior Instrument Scientist at Caltech Optical Observatories, California Institute of Technology. He was responsible for the design and successful 2013 and 2016 SCExAO instrument rebuilds, which included upgrading to the 2000 element deformable mirror and reflective rather than refractive relay optics (2013), and simultaneous feed of feed CHARIS, MEC, SAPHIRA and GLINT (2016). He demonstrated the efficient injection of star light from an ExAO system to a single mode fiber and the subsequent use of a photonic spectrograph to characterize the target Nem
Dr. Thayne Currie (website) is an astrophysicist at NASA-Ames Research Center and the Subaru Telescope. He focuses on image processing/PSF subtraction code to reduce SCExAO/CHARIS data, advances in wavefront control and coronagraphy, and the science program for SCExAO focused on directly imaging exoplanets and planet-forming disks. Thayne Currie
Dr. Ananya Sahoo was a PhD student in the SCExAO team who graduated in 2020. Her research is focused on wavefront sensing and control for high contrast imaging. She is working on injecting light from SCExAO to IRD (Infrared Doppler Spectrometer) instrument and suppressing speckles for young massive planet spectroscopy. Ananya Sahoo
Dr. Christophe Clergeon was involved in many rebuilds and upgrades of SCExAO throughout his PhD. His project focused on the design, build and early implementation of the non-modulated pyramid wavefront sensor for high-order wavefront correction on SCExAO. Christophe demonstrated the closed-loop operation of the wavefront sensor for the first 10 Zernike modes and 900 Fourier modes in the laboratory. Christophe is currently involved in the upgrade of AO188, which will benefit the SCExAO operations in near future. Pulpit rock
 

Hosted students

  • Steven Bos is a PhD student at the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands. He visited the team for about 2 months in 2018, to work in-situ on focal plane wavefront control algorithms.
  • Prashant Pathak obtained his PhD in 2017, working on real-time atmospheric dispersion compensation.
  • Sean Goebel, started in October 2014 and obtained his PhD in July 2018 with the Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii. He worked on using photon counting IR detectors for advanced wavefront control. Sean is working with the Selex, SAPHIRA detector and laying the ground work for the MKIDS array to arrive from UCSB. He spent half his time at Subaru Telescope and the rest at the IfA.

  • Nour Skaf, from Institut d'Optique (Paris), worked in 2018 on wavefront control software for both SCExAO and AO188.

  • Garima Singh, currently working at LESIA's high contrast imaging group in the Observatoire de Paris, was a PhD student in the SCExAO team (2012-2015). She implemented on the Low-Order Wavefront Sensor (LOWFS), a critical part of SCExAO's wavefront control architecture, and obtained her PhD in Sept 2015. Garima continues to collaborate with the SCExAO team on wavefront control and coronagraphy issues.

  • Vincent Garrel, student at Observatoire de Paris (France), completed his PhD within the SCExAO team in 2012. He focused on the possible uses of a photon-counting camera both for science (lucky imaging) and for wavefront sensing (non-linear curvature wavefront sensor). Vincent was also part of the Subaru AO team and lead the crew of spotters for LGS AO runs.

  • Sebastien Vievard worked with the SCExAO team as an undergraduate student from Observatoire de Paris, on a 6 month internship over the summer of 2013. Sebastien was influential in getting the FIRST instrument setup at Subaru and interfaced with SCExAO. He lead the alignment and testing of that module during his time.

  • Nicolas Parot, an undergraduate student visited us for a 3 month internship in the summer of 2013. He looked into appropriate disk targets for SCExAO and helped with the rebuild.

  • Tyler Groff, visited the SCExAO group several times during his PhD to help with the design and assembly of the early version of the instrument. He was critical to early observing runs and is the PI of a shaped pupil coronagraph currently installed within SCExAO. He worked on the SCExAO instrument throughout 2009-2012 and is now an on-going collaborator via the CHARIS integral field spectrograph project.

  • Paul Stewart, a graduate student from the University of Sydney visited the SCExAO team in 2011 and 2012. He worked on implementing the dual level (visible and IR) benches in SCExAO for the first time. He is currently involved with the visitor module VAMPIRES.

  • Takashi Yoshikawa, graduate student at the University of Tokyo (Japan), worked with the SCExAO group over the winter of 2009/2010. Takashi majored in space engineering and his focus was on attitude determination and control of spacecrafts. He contributed to the micro-satellite projects PRISM and Nano-JASMINE. During his stay he learnt about AO techniques and in particular phase diversity, to apply some of the tricks to space telescopes.

  • Kaito Yokochi, graduate student at the University of Tokyo (Japan), also visited over the winter of 2009/2010, to learn about the PIAA and help with the integration of an early version of SCExAO. His experience in interferometry and wavefront sensing techniques made him a great asset to our team. Kaito also explores ways to implement other coronagraphs like the 8OPM and UNI-PAC to SCExAO.

  • Frederic Vogt from Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (Switzerland) worked with the SCExAO team in 2009 on the design and implementation of the Coronagraphic Low-Order Wavefront Sensor.

  • Gaetano Sivo, Master's student from Universite de Paris-Sud XI, contributed to the opto-mechanical design of the SCExAO bench and set up an alignment procedure for the different elements of the coronagraph in 2009.

  • Julien Lozi, an undergraduate student worked on the characterization of the first PIAA lenses in addition to the alignment of the SCExAO instrument in 2008 during a 6 month internship.


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