Erika Tobiason Hamden is an American astrophysicist and associate professor at the University of Arizona and Steward Observatory. Her research focuses on developing ultraviolet (UV) detector technology, ultraviolet–visible spectroscopy (UV/VIS) instrumentation and spectroscopy, and galaxy evolution.[1] She served as the project scientist and project manager of a UV multi-object spectrograph, FIREBall-2, that is designed to observe the circumgalactic medium (CGM).[2] She is a 2019 TED fellow.[3]
Erika Hamden | |
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Born | Erika Tobiason Hamden |
Alma mater | Harvard College (AB) Le Cordon Bleu (Dip.) Columbia University (MPhil, MA, PhD) |
Awards | TED Fellow (2019) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Astrophysics |
Institutions | California Institute of Technology University of Arizona |
Thesis | FIREBall, CHAS, and the Diffuse Universe (2014) |
Doctoral advisor | David Schiminovich |
Website | ehamden |
Hamden was born in Montclair, New Jersey. Hamden studied astrophysics at Harvard College and graduated in 2006.[4] Hamden worked at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics, completing a senior thesis under Andrew Szentgyorgyi.[4] After graduating, she completed a diploma at Le Cordon Bleu in London, before working as a chef in New Jersey. She joined Columbia University for her doctoral studies in 2007, earning a PhD supervised by David Schiminovich in 2014.[5] She worked on the diffuse galactic far UV background using archival GALEX data, far UV bright galactic clouds, UV detector development, and ultraviolet instrumentation.[6][4] She held a NASA Earth and Space Science fellowship from 2011 to 2014.
Hamden joined California Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral researcher, working with Christopher Martin. Here she developed an ultraviolet telescope for a high-altitude balloon, the "Faint Intergalactic medium Redshifted Emission Balloon" (FIREBall-2).[4][7] FIREBall-2 will observe circumgalactic media (CGM) emission in the ultraviolet.[8] She appeared on the podcast 365 Days of Astronomy.[9] She was a National Science Foundation Astronomy and Astrophysics postdoctoral fellow in 2014.[10] The fellowship allowed her to develop instrumentation to study galaxies in the Keck Cosmic Web Imager redshift range.[11] In 2016 she was the first woman to be awarded a NASA Nancy Roman technology fellowship for her work in detectors.[12] She was made a Robert Andrews Millikan fellow in 2017.
Hamden joined the faculty at the University of Arizona and Steward Observatory in 2018.[13] Here she is building a UV detector lab and continuing work on FIREBall-2 and as the project scientist for the Keck Cosmic Reionization Mapper.
She is interested in silicon detector technologies and Lyman-alpha emission from the circumgalactic media.[14] She has worked on anti-reflective coatings for delta-doped CCDs, helping to improve their efficiency in the ultraviolet.[15][16][17] FIREBall-2 was designed to test this new technology.[8] The electron multiplying charge-coupled devices (EMCCDs) can suffer from clock-induced charge and spurious signals and require carefully designed shaped pixel clocks to minimize noise.[18][19] She has worked as US lead on FIREBall-2 from 2014 to its launch on September 22, 2018. Hamden was present during integration of FIREBall-2 at Fort Sumner in 2018, when a falcon landed in the telescope.[20]
Hamden is a member of the Goddard Space Flight Center Cosmic Origins Science Working Group.[21] She is one of 20 people selected as TED fellow in 2019.[22][23] Her TED Talk was selected by TED as a highlight of their April 2019 conference, and covered by Wired magazine.[24][25]
Her awards and honors include
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