Julia Roman-Duval

As the head of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) mission office at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), Dr. Julia Roman-Duval is responsible for leading the observatory’s staff and science operations center, collaborating with mission partners to represent scientific and operational interests, and managing the mission’s budget to maximize Hubble’s scientific return. She has been an astronomer at the institute since 2011.

Dr. Roman-Duval has supported the HST for several years. She served as the HST mission office’s deputy head from 2023 to 2024. Prior to that, she was an instrument scientist on its Cosmic Origin Spectrograph (COS) team between 2011 and 2023. In addition to a wide range of responsibilities pertaining to detectors, calibration, pipeline, and user support, she made critical contributions to COS, including devising new strategies and leading several complex feasibility studies and commissioning programs to extend the instrument’s lifetime to 2030 and beyond. She also made important contributions to the Hubble Spectroscopic Legacy Archive (HSLA).

From 2019 to 2023, Dr. Roman-Duval led the implementation of Hubble’s Ultraviolet Legacy Library of Young Stars as Essential Standards (ULLYSES) program, a 1,000-orbit director’s discretionary program that captured spectra of hundreds of massive stars in nearby low-metallicity dwarf galaxies and dozens of low-mass stars still in their formation stages in the Milky Way. ULLYSES is the largest program executed with Hubble to date, and provides researchers with insights into stellar formation, evolution, and the impact of young stars on their surroundings.

Dr. Roman-Duval joined the institute in 2009 as a postdoctoral researcher studying dust in the interstellar medium (ISM) of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds using Herschel Space Observatory observations taken as part of the HERschel Inventory of The Agents of Galactic Evolution (HERITAGE) key project. She also led independent research to study ISM turbulence, and the properties and distribution of molecular clouds in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies using surveys in the millimeter and radio wavelengths.

Throughout her career, Dr. Roman-Duval has led and contributed to dozens of observing programs with HST, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), and other space- and ground-based facilities. She is the principal investigator (PI) of large HST programs that shed light on how the abundance and composition of interstellar dust change at low metallicity, and how these changes impact our ability to track the chemical enrichment of the universe over cosmic time. She is also the PI of JWST programs to investigate the abundance and properties of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in low metallicity galaxies. Dr. Roman-Duval publishes as lead author and co-author in the Astronomical Journal, the Astrophysical Journal, Astronomy & Astrophysics, and the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Since 2011, she has co-led the ISM* research group at STScI, working with other PIs, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students to pursue ambitious research programs, provide research direction to the group, and spawn and cultivate novel ideas for proposals and research projects. She also mentors other STScI postdocs, science staff, and technical staff.

Education:

PhD in Astronomy, Boston University
MS in Astrophysics, Paul Sabatier University, Toulouse, France
MS in Aerospace Engineering, Ecole Nationale Supérieure de l'Aéronautique et de l'Espace (SUPAERO), Toulouse, France
BS in Aerospace Engineering, Ecole Nationale Supérieure de l'Aéronautique et de l'Espace (SUPAERO), Toulouse, France

Research Interests:

• Turbulence in the ISM and molecular clouds, and its relation to star formation
• Phases and tracers of the ISM, in particular for CO-dark gas
• Dust properties and abundance in nearby galaxies using ultraviolet (UV) spectroscopy (dust depletions), UV-visible photometry (dust extinction), far-infrared photometry (dust emission), millimeter and radio wavelengths spectroscopy (gas emission)
• Chemical evolution of galaxies and the universe

Research Topics: Interstellar Medium, Interstellar Dust, Interstellar Medium Phases, Molecular Clouds, Interstellar Medium Turbulence, Star Formation, Milky Way, Nearby Galaxies, Ultraviolet, Infrared, Millimeter-Radio Astronomy

Professional Websites:

Julia Roman-Duval
Hubble’s ULLYSES Program

ORCID ID: 0000-0001-6326-7069