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Tom Crawford,
Senior Research Associate

Address:
University of Chicago
Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics
933 East 56th Street, LASR 106
Chicago, IL 60637

Office: LASR 106
Phone: 773 702 9751
e-mail: tcrawfor_at_kicp.uchicago.edu

Current CV (last updated Feb. 2011)


About Me:
I'm a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics and the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics. at the University of Chicago For the past eight years, I have worked on a single project: The 10-meter South Pole Telescope (SPT). The SPT is a millimeter-wave telescope designed to make sensitive measurements of diffuse, low-contrast emission, such as anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Equipped with a highly sensitive ~1000-element bolometer array operating at 95, 150, and 220 GHz, the SPT is capable of mapping the arcminute-scale anisotropy of the CMB to exquisite precision. The first goal of the SPT is to use the CMB as a backlight to discover distant, massive clusters of galaxies through their interaction with the CMB, known as the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect.

In 2008, the SPT team reported the first successful use of SZ observations to find previously unknown clusters. More recently, the team has published the first cosmological constraints from an SZ-selected sample of clusters, the first detection of the SZ power spectrum, the first millimeter-wave detection of fluctuations in the cosmic infrared background, and the discovery of a new family of high-redshift star-forming galaxies.

In the eight years I have worked on this project, I have particpated in the design of the telescope, optics, and receiver; I have designed and built a protoype SPT receiver (which was used to qualify the secondary mirror and cold optics box); and now I am one of the leaders of the data analysis effort.

If you want to know more about my academic & scientific history, here's my CV (last updated Feb. 2011).

In my spare time, I moonlight as a professional singer.

Useful Links:
SPT public site
SPT internal website
SPT Chicago wiki
SPT Pole wiki
arXiv.org
ADS Search
University of Chicago Astronomy and Astrophysics
University of Chicago
KICP
Thunch Server



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