Karoline Gilbert

As Project Scientist in the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope mission office, Dr. Karoline Gilbert provides leadership for the institute’s Roman Space Telescope science community engagement activities, and works with all Roman mission partners to maximize the scientific return of Roman's surveys. Dr. Gilbert also holds a position as a Research Scientist in the The Johns Hopkins University’s Department of Physics and Astronomy.

Dr. Gilbert joined the institute in 2013. Before joining the Roman mission office, she worked on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) as part of the NIRSpec Instrument Team and led the team responsible for providing scientific guidance for the development of the JWST Exposure Time Calculator. Upon joining the Roman mission office in 2016, Dr. Gilbert served in the role of Mission Scientist, providing scientific leadership for the institute’s Roman Space Telescope science operations, which include the mission’s planning and scheduling system, the data processing system for the Wide Field Instrument, and the mission's data archive.

Prior to joining the institute, Dr. Gilbert spent three years as a Hubble Fellow at the University of Washington in Seattle. Dr. Gilbert's primary research interest is in reconstructing the history of nearby galaxies by studying their resolved stellar populations. She uses optical spectroscopy with large ground-based telescopes and ultraviolet through near-infrared imaging with the Hubble Space Telescope to study the stellar dynamics, chemical abundances, and star formation histories of nearby galaxies. Dr. Gilbert compares these detailed observations with predictions from simulations of galaxy formation and evolution to infer the merger history of galaxies in the local universe.

As a researcher focused on understanding galaxy formation and evolution from the studies of resolved stars, Dr. Gilbert both leads and collaborates on large surveys of the stellar populations of the Andromeda Galaxy, its environs, and its satellites, as well as dwarf galaxies in the Local Volume. Dr. Gilbert has co-led projects that have amassed large spectroscopic datasets to study Andromeda and its satellites.

These projects have tackled understanding and constraining the formation of Andromeda's stellar halo through measuring elemental abundances of individual stars; quantifying the kinematics and elemental abundances, and thus formation and evolution, of M33's disk and stellar halo (The Triangulum Extended (TREX) Survey); and most recently, an extensive spectroscopic survey of Andromeda's southern disk, similarly aimed at constraining the formation and evolution of Andromeda's disk and stellar halo.

Dr. Gilbert also played a key role in the SPLASH Survey (Spectroscopic and Photometric Landscape of Andromeda's Stellar Halo), and is a collaborator on large Hubble programs that have panchromatically imaged extensive regions of Andromeda's and M33's disks (PHAT, PHAST, and PHATTER). Dr. Gilbert is also co-PI of LUVIT (the Local Ultraviolet to Infrared Treasury), a survey that combines new and archival Hubble imaging of 23 dwarf galaxies within 3.5 Mpc in order to study their recent star formation and dust properties. Dr. Gilbert's research has been supported by grants obtained through the National Science Foundation and NASA.

Education:

PhD in Astronomy & Astrophysics, University of California, Santa Cruz
MS in Astronomy & Astrophysics, University of California, Santa Cruz
BA in Physics & Astronomy, The Ohio State University

Science Interests:

• Formation and evolution of stellar halos
• Star formation histories of Local Group and Local Volume galaxies
• The accretion history of galaxies as traced by their resolved stellar populations
• The interstellar medium in Local Group and Local Volume galaxies

Research Topics: Star Formation, Histories, and Evolution; Local Group Galaxies; Interstellar Medium; Resolved Stellar Populations; Astrochemistry, Chemical Abundances

Professional Websites:

Professional Website

ORCID ID: 0000-0003-0394-8377