Annual Report 2025

Annual Report 2025

Annual Report 2025

About Us | Who We Are

Message from the Director

Impact Dashboard

Highlights

The Rubin Observatory Construction Project is Complete and LSST is About to Begin

Scheduler & Survey Strategy: 20,000+ Pointings and a Self-Driving Telescope

Report on LEO Satellite Impacts on Ground-based Optical Astronomy for the Rubin Observatory LSST

Ultra-fast Rotators Among Rubin’s First Asteroid Discoveries

Student Summer Research Prize

Discovering Dark Matter with Stellar Streams in LSST

From Mentorship to Catalog: Measuring Satellite Streaks with DECam

A Systematic Search for Main-Sequence Dipper Stars with the Zwicky Transient Facility

Welcome Postdoctoral Fellow: Nick Tusay

Our Community

A Year of Discovery: Thank You for Being Part of It!

Messages from Advisory Board Members

Supporting the Next Generation: DiRAC Fellowships

About Us | Who We Are

Vision

A universe understood through data-intensive discovery.

Mission

To build the world's most advanced datasets, algorithms, and tools and use them to explore and understand the universe.

The DiRAC Institute is a world leading, interdisciplinary research center that addresses fundamental questions about the origins and evolution of our universe.

Our research brings together scientists across many disciplines on a mission to understand the nature of Dark Matter and Dark Energy, the emergence of structure within the universe, the formation of galaxies, the birth and evolution of black holes, the transformations of stars, and the origins of the planets.

Visit our website to learn more https://dirac.astro.washington.edu/

Message from the Director

James RA Davenport Director, DiRAC Institute

As we look back on the past year at the DiRAC Institute, I am filled with gratitude and pride for what we have accomplished together. 2025 was a year of landmarks — a time for reflection on how far we’ve come, and for thoughtful preparation for an extraordinary period ahead.

A central theme throughout the year was “readiness”. As the Vera C. Rubin Observatory begins full operations in 2026, DiRAC researchers have played a leading role in preparing the science, infrastructure, and people needed to fully realize its promise. From advancing data-intensive approaches in solar system science and asteroid discovery, to presenting the real-time Rubin view of the time varying cosmos, our community has been deeply involved in shaping how this new era of discovery will unfold. Being able to celebrate the magnificent First Look images with so many of you this summer in Kane Hall was a truly moving experience for me. I know we’ll have MANY exciting stories to share  in 2026!

Equally important has been our investment in people. In the coming year, we aim to welcome our largest cohort of postdoctoral researchers in five years, a significant milestone for the Institute and a clear signal of our continued commitment to early-career scientists. This excellence is driven by foundational and dynamic support from our community, and I am so grateful to the partnerships and wisdom that we have gained, particularly from Lisa and Charles Simonyi, and Janet and Lloyd Frink. These postdocs will be the catalyst that drives discovery across a wide range of astrophysical questions in the coming years, while strengthening the collaborative, interdisciplinary culture that defines DiRAC. I can’t wait to introduce them to the amazing community here in Seattle!

Message from the Director

I also want to celebrate the resilience, creativity, and shared purpose of our academic community. The students, staff, and faculty at DiRAC fill me with joy and optimism each month at our All Hands meetings, where they share new research results or head-scratching challenges. Our Advisory Board has been exceptionally generous with their time and wisdom, and helped me grow as a leader this year. In spite of a shifting funding landscape, our team continues to show up for each other, and make DiRAC a place I am proud to come to work to every day.

Looking toward the flood of discoveries expected in 2026, it is a comfort to know that we are surrounded by so many supporters both locally and globally. The researchers of DiRAC continue to be out in the community giving talks, running events, and sharing moments of wonder and exploration with folks from all walks of life. These connections remind us that our work is not only about data and telescopes, but about curiosity, creativity, and a shared sense of wonder. I hope you’ll join us for one of our planetarium shows, lectures, or catch our team at an Astronomy on Tap or other event around town.

Thank you for being part of the DiRAC story. We look forward to the year ahead with excitement, gratitude, and a deep belief in what we can accomplish together.

Keep looking up!

James Davenport Director, DiRAC Institute

Dashboard

2,103

Asteroid discoveries were the first made by NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory and released during Rubin First Look in June 2025

Extremely fast rotating asteroids identified among the first asteroid discoveries made with the Rubin Observatory

~1,000

Published papers

Highlights

The Rubin Observatory Construction Project is Complete and LSST is About to Begin!

Scheduler & Survey Strategy: 20,000+ Pointings and a Self-Driving Telescope

Report on LEO Satellite Impacts on Ground-based Optical Astronomy for the Rubin Observatory LSST

Ultra-fast Rotators Among Rubin’s First Asteroid Discoveries

Student Summer Research Prize

Discovering Dark Matter with Stellar Streams in LSST

From Mentorship to Catalog: Measuring Satellite Streaks with DECam

A Systematic Search for Main-Sequence Dipper Stars with the Zwicky Transient Facility

Welcome Postdoctoral Fellow: Nick Tusay

Rubin Observatory

The Rubin Observatory Construction Project

is Complete and LSST is About to Begin!

Overall, 2025 was a pivotal year for Rubin Observatory: moving the observatory from the construction phase into early operations and demonstrating its revolutionary potential for astronomy.

In early April 2025, the integration of the main camera (LSST Camera) with the Simonyi Survey Telescope and other systems of the observatory was successfully completed. The first images of the night sky were captured on April 15, 2025. This achievement was called the “First Photon”. It was the culmination of over 20 years of work by many hundreds of people, from the first ideas and designs to a functional observatory.

We expected that it would take at least several hours of fine-tuning the system until we captured high-quality images. However, it only took us two 30-second exposures to bring the camera into the focal plane and the third image looked perfect! Everyone in the control room was delighted with this success.

1: This image shows a small portion of a cluster of galaxies in the constellation Virgo, taken from the Vera Rubin Observatory with the LSSTCamera. The image offers a vivid glimpse into the diversity of celestial objects. Easily visible are two prominent spiral galaxies, three merging galaxies, groups of much more distant galaxies, stars within our Milky Way, and much more. The entire image covers about 100 times larger sky region and can be explored using the web tool SkyViewer (link in the text).

Anna Johnson CEO and Founder, Visions

After the “First Photon” night, we continued to capture images for the next ten nights for a program called the “Rubin First Look”. It was a media event, leading to a press conference on June 23, 2025 in Washington, D.C., where we showed Rubin's night sky images to the world for the first time. The event was followed from about 350 locations around the world and seen by several hundred thousand people. A recording of the press conference is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/live/Zv22_Amsreo

Showing Rubin's images is not easy because of the large number of pixels in the camera: 3,200 megapixels covering an area of sky equal to about 45 full Moons. That's more pixels than the human eye can "see". We would need 400 high-definition televisions to show just one Rubin image! That would mean covering an entire basketball court with TV screens to display a single image.

Instead of watching 400 TV screens at once, the Rubin team has developed a web-based image viewer that can be used to navigate through Rubin's giant images, to zoom in, to explore, to admire the details of any object you choose to view. This tool, called SkyViewer, can be used by yourself for free, all you need is an internet connection and a computer or smartphone (https://skyviewer.app/explorer).

Figure 1 shows the Rubin image of a small part of the sky, about 1% of the total image captured by the LSST camera. Even in that small image there are about 100,000 galaxies. Figure 3 is of a similar size in the sky and shows the Lagoon Nebula. This nebula is a large cloud of gas and interstellar dust in which young stars are still being born. These two images show what the map of the sky produced by Rubin's LSST (Legacy Survey of Space and Time) project will one day look like. This map will be recorded over the next 10 years and will cover an area of the sky about 100,000 times larger than these two images. Using this map of the sky, astronomers will detect and measure about 40 billion objects – for the first time, an astronomical catalog will have more celestial objects than there are living people on Earth! The summer of 2025 was focused on taking data for the so-called science validation survey. At the same time, the team was busy improving observing efficiency and the image sharpness. The final construction project review, combined with a review of the readiness of Rubin Operations team to take over, took place in October in Chile. The team is currently performing final fine tuning of observatory systems to enable the start of LSST in early 2026. The filming of the largest astronomical movie will begin soon!

Scheduler & Survey Strategy: 20,000+ Pointings and a Self-Driving Telescope

The scheduler and survey strategy team accomplishments: the scheduler software was deployed on-sky, making Rubin an automated self-driving telescope, and pointed the telescope over 20,000 times for the Science Verification survey.

With Rubin observatory going on sky, we need to decide where to actually point the telescope. At full speed, Rubin can take 800-1,000 images a night, too many for a person to decide on each individual pointing. The Rubin scheduling team (Peter Yoachim (UW), Lynne Jones (Rubin), and Eric Neilsen (Fermi Lab)) has worked with the Rubin Survey Cadence Optimization Committee to build a software package that can intelligently point the telescope in real time to enable a broad range of science cases. Essentially, giving Rubin the ability to go into full self-driving mode.

Between May and September 2025, the scheduling software was deployed on the main telescope with the full camera for the first time, making over 20,000 science observations. This included over 13,000 observations designed to be like the Rubin's Wide Fast Deep survey, and nearly 1,000 visits in Deep Drilling Field mode. We also had a first successful test of using the Rubin scheduler to automate the search for targets of opportunity, targeting interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS.

Peter Yoachim is a staff scientist at the University of Washington working with Rubin on survey strategy and telescope scheduler optimization. Scientifically, Peter works on galaxy formation and evolution, particularly using IFS observations to measure galaxy dynamics and star formation histories.

Report on LEO Satellite Impacts on Ground-based Optical Astronomy for the Rubin Observatory LSST

In August 2025, Meredith Rawls, UW/DiRAC Research Scientist and Co-Lead of SatHub at the IAU Centre for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky (CPS), and Brianna Smart, UW/DiRAC Research Scientist, attended an NSF-funded workshop on satellite constellations and Rubin Observatory at UC Davis.

The workshop resulted in a report titled, “Report on LEO satellite impacts on ground-based optical astronomy for the Rubin Observatory LSST,” which was shared on arXiv in September (v1). The report aims to minimize the impact of Starlink-like constellations on LSST science and acknowledges it cannot encompass all satellites or all observatories. Nevertheless, in addition to affirming previous recommendations, including satellite darkening mitigations, low orbital altitudes, and timely data sharing of satellite positions and trajectories, the report introduces new ones, such as coordinated de-orbit strategies, developing metrics that account for the impact of full constellations, and building a comprehensive database of satellite signatures in LSST data down to low surface brightness.

Meredith Rawls is a research scientist in the Department of Astronomy and DiRAC at the University of Washington. She writes software to handle terabytes of nightly data from Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which will ultimately become the highest resolution movie of the night sky ever made. She earned a BS from Harvey Mudd, a MS from San Diego State, and a PhD from New Mexico State. Her background is in stellar astrophysics, but lately she studies the plethora of newly-launched low-Earth-orbit satellites in the hopes observers worldwide don’t lose the night sky. She lives with her family in Seattle, enjoys playing viola, and primarily gets around by e-bike.

Brianna Smart is a research scientist in the Department of Astronomy and DiRAC at the University of Washington. She writes software as part of the Alert Productions Data Management group in support of the Vera C. Rubin Observatoriy’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time. She earned her B.S. in Astronomy and Physics at the University of Arizona, and her M.S. and PhD from The University of Wisconsin. Brianna has a varied background in astronomy from exoplanets to stellar dynamics to diffuse ionized gas. She also enjoys any science topic related to the Magellanic Clouds.

Ultra-fast Rotators Among Rubin’s First Asteroid Discoveries

The NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s First Look media event that took place on June 23, 2025 in which the first LSST Camera commissioning images were released, included the announcement of its first asteroid discoveries - 2,103 discoveries in all. The roughly 340,000 individual detections in which the 2,103 discoveries were made span 9 nights between April 21 and May 5, 2025. With a faint magnitude range (~23-25 mag) and dense time sampling under an irregular, commissioning driven cadence, the Rubin First Look observations provided an ideal dataset for determining asteroid rotation periods, including the detection of rapid rotation. In a paper, recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, NSF NOIRLab Assistant Astronomer and UW Astronomy Affiliate Assistant Professor Sarah Greenstreet, UW Astronomy graduate student Chester Li, UW Astronomy postdoctoral scholar Dmitrii Vavilov, UW Astronomy undergraduate student Devanshi Singh, and their colleagues present light curves, rotation periods, and colors for the first asteroid discoveries made with the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory.

The paper includes modeled light curves and derived rotation periods and colors for the 2,103 objects, finding 76 asteroids with reliable, robust rotation periods spanning < 2 minutes to > 21 hours; all but one of the asteroids in the data set reside in the Solar System’s main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, while the remaining asteroid is a near-Earth object (NEO). Notably, they found 19 ultra- to super-fast rotators with periods shorter than the 2.2-hr spin barrier; the spin barrier is the maximum rotation rate an object can sustain before the centrifugal force overcomes self-gravity, potentially leading to structural fragmentation of the asteroid or the formation of a binary asteroid. Surprisingly, they additionally find that Rubin-discovered main-belt asteroid (MBA) 2025 MN45 is now the fastest rotating known asteroid with a diameter larger than 0.5 km (longer than the length of 5 football fields), rotating once every 1.9 min! Along with Rubin-discovered NEO 2025 MJ71 (1.9 min; 120 m) and MBA 2025 MK41 (3.8 min; 540 m), these three ultra-fast rotators now join a couple of previously-known near-Earth asteroids as the fastest spinning sub-km asteroids known. Other notable large super-fast rotators include 2025 MV71 (13 min; 930 m) and 2025 MG56 (16 min; 660 m).

Magnitude (brightness) over time for Rubin First Look Solar System object discovery, 2025 MM81, both for the full observation period (top; MJD=modified Julian date, covering 25 April 2025 to 5 May 2025) and zoomed-in on a single night (bottom; 60797 MJD = 2 May 2025) to see the brightness variation. Observations were taken using three filters (g-, r-, and i-band) covering different wavelength ranges; the number of observations in each band is shown in the legend. The magnitude (brightness) variation, its extent (approx. 1.2 magnitudes), the object’s rotation period (approx. 0.045 days = 1.1 hr), and even its colors (e.g., g – r ~ 0.6) can be determined directly from the raw photometry from a single night of observations.

As this study demonstrates, even in early commissioning, Rubin is successfully probing the previously sparsely sampled population of large-sized asteroids that reside at greater distances than other astronomical surveys have been able to observe spinning at these very fast rotation speeds. Although this data set consists of observations taken at a different cadence, subject to the requirements of Rubin’s commissioning period, than will be followed during Rubin’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), expected to start later this year, with millions of asteroid discoveries expected from the survey in the coming years, the findings of this study are just the beginning of the exciting science the Rubin Observatory will unlock and the astronomers at UW Astronomy’s DiRAC Institute are poised to lead.

Sarah Greenstreet is a tenure-track assistant astronomer at the NSF National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab) and an affiliate assistant professor in the University of Washington’s Department of Astronomy. She is also a member of the Rubin Observatory Community Science Team and has served as the Lead for the Rubin Observatory Solar System Science Collaboration’s Near-Earth Objects and Interstellar Objects Working Group for the past seven years.

To learn more about her research, please visit her website: www.sarahgreenstreet.com.

Dmitrii Vavilov is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington and a former Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Paris Observatory. He studied astronomy at St. Petersburg State University and earned his Ph.D. in celestial mechanics from the Institute of Applied Astronomy of the Russian Academy of Sciences. His research focuses on the dynamics and physical properties of small Solar System bodies (like asteroids and comets) from their dynamical evolution to shape transformations.

Zhuofu (Chester) Li is a Ph.D. student studying Astrophysics, Statistics, and Data Science at the University of Washington. His research integrates data science, astrophysics, and machine learning to explore the mysteries of the Universe. Chester is also the founder of the UW Data Science Society, where he builds interdisciplinary collaborations between astronomy, statistics, and computer science.

Devanshi Singh is a third-year undergraduate studying Astronomy and Applied Physics at the University of Washington. Currently, Devanshi is developing a Bayesian algorithm with Prof. Ivezić and Prof. Jurić to prioritize follow-up observations of Potentially Hazardous Asteroids detected by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. She also works with Dr. Chandler's observing team at the Apache Point Observatory 3.5m telescope, collecting data on active asteroids and other interesting small bodies in the Solar System.

Student Summer Research Prize

I was lucky to work on a team that spans so far: categorizing new stellar stream extensions, tackling processing massive survey data, and hacking on Rubin's DP1! I became certain this summer that I'd pursue a career in astronomy!

Elliott Burdett

The work I did with Professor Long was an incredibly enlightening introduction to stacking and data validation. We were able to design and create a semi-automated photometric pipeline tailored to cross-reference IR photometry stamps with inferometry data taken deeper into the radio spectrum. We then directed our efforts towards exploratory analysis of high-uncertainty potentially atypical object detections in the Ex-MORA dusty star-forming galaxy catalog. We specifically focused on objects exhibiting an increase in luminosity correlated with increasing wavelength. Working with a limited set of distant candidates, we were much more successful at confirming false positives through stacking than detecting new galaxies, though the project was certainly still able to contribute to the continuing refinement and validation of Ex-MORA data.

…Attached: a photometric stacking of (high-sigma, low-uncertainty) Ex-MORA candidates. The first attached stacked photo is taken using the ALMA 2mm interferometry array and the second is from the F444W of JWST's NIRCam.

Simon Dawson

2025

Elliott Burdett (Advisor: Nora Shipp)

Searching for Stellar Stream Extensions in the DELVE Survey

Simon Dawson (Advisor: Arianna Long) Characterizing High-z dusty star-forming galaxies (DSFGs) with JWST

2024

Felix Knowlton (Advisors: Jake Kurlander, Mario Jurić) High-Fidelity HelioLinC

Stress-Testing for LSST Preparedness

Giovanni Gollotti (Advisors: Andy Tzanidakis, Tobin Wainer, James Davenport)

A New Candidate Triplet Binary System in the Beta-Pic Moving Group: HIP 23309

Maggie Vickers (Advisor: Bruce Balick) Examining Density Tracers in Low-Ionization structures in Planetary Nebula

Sophia Watts (Advisors Yakov Faerman, Matt McQuinn) Investigating intergalactic filaments and sheets

2023

Katelyn Ebert (Advisor: Prof. Matt McQuinn): Precision Measurement of the Hubble Constant with Fast Radio Bursts

John Delker (Advisor: Prof. Andy Connolly): Classifying Transients with ParSNIP

Celeste Hagee (Advisors: Andy Tzanidakis and Prof. James Davenport): Building a Data-Driven Calibration Model for the Gaia BP/RP Epochal Spectra Using Supernovae

Bowang Lan (Advisors: Jake Kurlander and Prof. Mario Juric): Investigations with HelioLinC

Benjamin Herrera (Advisor: Prof. Sarah Tuttle): MARVIN Optimization for Generalized IFU Use

2022

Arif Chu (Advisor: Nima Sedaghat) Exploring Data Preparation and Machine Learning approaches for LSST data

Ishan Coutinho (Advisors: Trevor Dorn-Wallenstein, Emily Levesque) Photometric Classification of Evolved Massive Stars: High-Resolution Spectroscopic Validation

Josue Torres (Advisor: James Davenport): Documenting and Testing of PyKOSMOS

Student Summer Research Prize

Discovering Dark Matter with Stellar Streams in LSST

Prof. Nora Shipp, DiRAC's host in Seattle

In November, the DiRAC Institute hosted the workshop "Discovering Dark Matter with Stellar Streams in LSST," bringing together scientists from across North America, South America, and Europe.

The workshop focused on preparing the community to measure dark matter properties using stellar streams—the tidal remnants of disrupted star clusters and dwarf galaxies that orbit in the Milky Way's outskirts.

Experts in theoretical modeling, observational data analysis, survey design, and dark matter physics collaborated to develop predictions and analysis pipelines ahead of the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). Local graduate and undergraduate students also participated, gaining the opportunity to meaningfully contribute to cutting-edge research and international collaborations.

Credit: RubinObs/NOIRLab/SLAC/NSF/DOE/AURA/J. daSilva, M. Zamani

Figure caption: An artist’s impression of streams of stars around a galaxy. The galaxy occupies most of the image as a fuzzy blue-white oval with spiral features extending out clockwise. The light clouds are interspersed with small dark brown splotches in the same spiral pattern around the center, representing dust clouds. The galaxy’s center is a bright yellow glow. Overlaid on top of and surrounding the galaxy are several criss-crossing, faint tendrils of stars that represent satellite dwarf galaxies and star clusters that have been stretched out into long thin lines. The tendrils have various lengths and widths, though all are arcs rather than complete circles. The background is black.

From Mentorship to Catalog: Measuring Satellite Streaks with DECam

Meredith Rawls mentored Alexa Serrano Mendoza, a student at Universidad Industrial de Santander, Columbia, during summer 2025 through the RECA program (https://www.astroreca.org/en/internship). Together with Andrés Plazas Malagón (SLAC), they completed initial work toward measuring the brightnesses of satellite streaks detected in a handful of archival images from the Dark Energy Camera DECam) on the Blanco 4 m telescope in Chile. The team is working on a short article describing the outcomes of the project.

More recently, Rawls began mentoring Kiyoaki Okudaira, an exchange student visiting UW from Japan. Together with DiRAC postdoctoral fellow Dino Bektešević, they are working to extend the DECam satellite project to identify and characterize the full streak dataset. One project goal is to produce a catalog with supporting data products that can be used to measure satellite trail brightnesses. This will help characterize the changing satellite population and its impacts on astronomical observations, including Rubin.

Published paper: "Identifying and Measuring Satellite Streaks in DECam Images"

A Systematic Search for Main-Sequence Dipper Stars with the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF)

Sky positions of the identified main-sequence dipper candidates (orange points) in Galactic coordinates. The background color map represents the number of Gaia DR3 sources per bin, highlighting the density of stars across the sky.

This study represents the largest search to date for “main-sequence dipper stars”, Sun-like stars that show unusual and often unpredictable dimming events. Anastasios (Andy) Tzanidakis and collaborators from the DiRAC Institute and the LINCC Frameworks group used 5 years' worth of data from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) survey to lead this new innovative discovery. Tzanidakis and collaborators built an elaborate algorithm capable of scanning through 63 million FGK stars, built a robust dip-scoring metric, and validated results with injection–recovery tests and image/PSF vetting. The search uncovered 81 new mysterious dipper candidates with diverse, often asymmetric dimming shapes on timescales from days to years. Most show no clear infrared excess, pointing to cold circumstellar dust clumps at large orbital radii rather than hot inner disks. The authors hypothesized that some of these stars could be dimmed by debris from collisions between young planetesimals or could be from the shadows of companion stars with large disks.

The publication has resulted in the largest catalog of the mysterious main-sequence dipper stars and will serve as a benchmark for testing models of planet and stellar evolution.

The LINCC Frameworks and DiRAC Institute at the University of Washington were central to making this possible. Their open-source, scalable infrastructure using the Large Survey Database (LSDB) enabled efficient handling of tens of millions of light curves, rigorous systematics control, and fast candidate examination, exactly the end-to-end approach needed for upcoming analyses to be done with the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST).

The scientific paper is currently under review in the Astrophysical Journal Letters (ApJL).

Tzanidakis will be presenting his results at the 247th American Astronomical Society (AAS) Winter meeting this upcoming January in Phoenix, Arizona.

Anastasios (Andy) Tzanidakis is a Ph.D. candidate in Astronomy at the University of Washington.

His research focuses on the discovery and footprints of circumstellar environments of Sun-like stars, which are laboratories for tracing how planetary systems take shape and evolve. Drawing on public telescope surveys and observations from telescopes around the world, such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), he seeks to discover some of the most unusual stars in the Milky Way by searching for disappearing Sun-like stars. Beyond research, Andy is passionate about science communication and expanding astronomical concepts to the general public. He previously served as the Director of the University of Washington Planetarium.

Welcome Postdoctoral Fellow: Nick Tusay

We are pleased to welcome Nick Tusay, who joined the team this September as a DiRAC Postdoctoral Fellow. Nick focuses on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and habitable worlds research. His SETI work has been executing and analyzing the results of novel search strategies to look for radio technosignatures using observatories like the Green Bank Telescope and the Allen Telescope Array.

His work on exoplanets has largely been focused on directly measuring the chemical components of disintegrating rocky bodies around main sequence stars to test our understanding of planet composition using both state-of-the-art ground-based optical observatories as well as space-based observatories like JWST.

Nick is excited to be co-PI on a JWST Cycle 4 Program to observe a recently discovered disintegrating exoplanet, BD+05 4868 Ab, executing this October. Using transmission spectroscopy in mid-infrared, his team will measure the spectrum of the dusty effluents coming off the planet and try to match that with features of known materials. It’s an exciting and rare opportunity to examine the interior composition of a rocky exoplanet around a main sequence star.

Our Community

A Year of Discovery: Thank you for being part of it!

Messages from Advisory Board Members

Supporting the Next Generation: DiRAC Fellowships

Thank You to Our Partners and Supporters

A Year of Discovery: Thank You for Being Part of It

As 2025 draws to a close, we find ourselves reflecting on a truly remarkable year — one filled with discovery, connection, and a shared sense of wonder about the universe we are working to understand. None of it would have been possible without you.

The highlight of the year was undoubtedly the Rubin Observatory First Look event. As the world turned its eyes to one of astronomy's most anticipated milestones, we were proud to host a dedicated Rubin lecture right here in Seattle, welcoming nearly 500 guests united by curiosity and a passion for the cosmos. It was a powerful reminder of just how deeply our community cares about the future of scientific discovery.

Throughout the year, our planetarium events offered something equally special, an opportunity to meet UW astronomers in person, ask questions, and hear firsthand about the extraordinary scientific progress unfolding in real time. These evenings were as inspiring for our team as they were for our guests, and they reflect exactly the kind of meaningful exchange we strive to create.

Looking ahead, we are energized by what's on the horizon. The Rubin Observatory is just beginning to transform our understanding of the night sky, and the UW and DiRAC teams are at the heart of that journey. We are excited to continue bringing those discoveries to you through events, lectures, and conversations that make cutting-edge science feel personal and accessible.

To stay connected, we invite you to sign up for our quarterly newsletter or follow our news feed on our website. Thank you for your support, your curiosity, and your belief in the power of science to inspire. We are grateful to have you as part of this community.

With gratitude,

Nikiolina Horvat DiRAC Director of Outreach

Join the local DiRAC community, learn about new discoveries, and meet UW Astronomers.

Messages from Advisory Board Members

Supporting the Next Generation: DiRAC Fellowships

Since 2017, our flagship program has been the DiRAC Postdoctoral Fellowship. This program has brought some of the best and brightest junior scholars to Seattle, enabled by the generous gift of the Charles and Lisa Simonyi Fund for Arts and Science. We are thrilled to continue offering the DiRAC Fellowship in 2025 thanks to the support of Lloyd & Janet Frink.

Our Fellows have the flexibility to work in the most exciting and emerging areas of astronomy, develop innovative algorithms, and engage with undergraduate and graduate students.

Thank You to Our Partners and Supporters!

Foundation Gifts

Charles & Lisa Simonyi

Lloyd & Janet Frink Institutions

B612 Foundation

Breakthrough Listen

Chisholm Foundation

Heising-Simons Foundation

Planet Society

Schmidt Futures

Washington Research Foundation

NASA

National Science Foundation

U.S. Department Of Eneregy

Individual Gifts

Galactic Level

Lex Lindsay & Lynn Manley Lindsay

David E. Brooks

Laurie & Ken Myer

Jennifer Gehrt & Lynn Johnson

Ron & Lori Marquardt

Theodore & Iris Wagner

Nebula Level

Jeffrey & Laura Glickman

Curt Blake

Atousa Salehi