PhD, Caltech
Dr. Alicia Lanz is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Carnegie Observatories, building astronomical instrumentation and studying the evolution of galaxies and the process of reionization of the universe. Dr. Lanz received her Ph.D. in Physics from Caltech in 2018, where she built an infrared telescope aboard a sounding rocket (called “CIBER-2”) to improve our understanding of the process of reionization, when the first stars ionized the gas that filled the universe and allowed light to travel freely.
At Carnegie Observatories, Dr. Lanz is currently building a fast near-infrared camera for Magellan Infrared Multi-object Spectrograph (MIRMOS). Additionally, Dr. Lanz recently completed the objective optics for the fifth Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-V) Local Volume Mapper (LVM) instrument, which will perform the SDSS-V integral-field spectroscopic survey of the Milky Way and Local Group of galaxies.
Prior to graduate school, Dr. Lanz worked as a systems engineer in industry for five years and spent one year as a technical advisor in the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy, where she became interested in the physics of climate change.
