Edward Schlafly

Dr. Edward Schlafly (Eddie) is an associate astronomer and member of the SCSB, working on the scientific pipeline for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.  His scientific interests focus on applying principled mathematical techniques to large astronomical data sets, with a particular emphasis on dust in the Milky Way.  He has worked on many of the largest surveys in astronomy, including SDSS, Pan-STARRS, WISE, DECam, and DESI, and is widely known for work measuring Galactic reddening and using measurements of stars to infer the three-dimensional structure of the Milky Way’s interstellar medium.

Prior to joining STScI, Dr. Schlafly’s worked in the Astronomy & Astrophysics Analytics group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, focusing on the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, which has obtained more than 10 million spectra of extragalactic objects in its first year of survey observations. A Hubble fellowship at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he collaborated on the imaging survey used for DESI targeting, made new full-sky catalogs of sources from WISE imaging, and studied the 3D structure of the Galaxy's dust. In the more distant past, he was a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and did his graduate work at Harvard, analyzing the Pan-STARRS1 survey, dust and the Milky Way Galaxy.

Education:

PhD in Physics, Harvard University
BS in Physics, Stanford University

Science Interests:

• Formation and evolution of globular clusters
• Nature of multiple stellar populations in globular clusters
• Extended main sequence turn-offs (eMSTOs) in intermediate-age star clusters
• Globular clusters as tools to understand galaxy evolution
• Stellar  populations in (early-type)  galaxies
• Nature of interstellar matter in early-type galaxies