Nic Scott, PhD (he/Him)
Nic Scott is the Telescope Systems Scientist at The CHARA Array, located at Mt. Wilson Observatory in California. The Array is the world's most powerful optical instrument, by combining the light from multiple telescopes, it's able to resolve details equivalent to being able to see a nickel from 10,000 miles away.
He is also a consulting Research Scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center, where he works with a team on the operation of three speckle interferometers on 8-meter class telescopes for exoplanet validation and characterization.
His main research interests are exozodiacal dust and its evolution, high angular resolution optical and near-IR instrumentation, speckle and long baseline optical interferometry, exoplanets, stellar astrophysics, hardware development and prototyping.
Nic received his Ph.D. in Astronomy from Georgia State University and the Observatoire de Paris, France, in 2015. For approximately 20 years, he has been working with optical instruments and in the laboratory, where he developed a broad skill set including alignment of optical systems, hardware design and development, and software for design, experimental control and data analysis such as Python, IDL, and 3D modeling.
Besides instrumentation, Nic has a background in photography, an interest in film and art, teaching, and public outreach.
Nic is available to speak about:
Telescopes
Exoplanets
Stellar astrophysics, and
Astronomy