Inaugural Barry Lasker Data Science Fellowship Goes to Gail Zasowski

The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, announces the initiation of the Barry M. Lasker Data Science Postdoctoral Fellowship.

The first recipient of the fellowship is Dr. Gail Zasowski of the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) in Baltimore, Maryland. The fellowship is named in honor of STScI astronomer Barry M. Lasker (1939-1999).

The Lasker Fellowship is an STScI-funded program designed to provide up to three years of support for outstanding postdoctoral researchers conducting innovative astronomical studies that involve the use or creation of one or more of the following: large astronomical databases, massive data processing, data visualization and discovery tools, or machine-learning algorithms. Lasker data science fellowship recipients are encouraged to explore interdisciplinary approaches to addressing the opportunities provided in the “Big Data” era of astronomy and to take significant advantage of the archived datasets held (or planned for ingest) at STScI, including those from HST, GALEX, Kepler/K2, Pan-STARRS, TESS, JWST, and WFIRST.

Dr. Lasker led the creation and development of the HST Guide Star Catalog (GSC) and the Digitized Sky Survey (DSS) archive. The GSC and DSS data products have been crucial to the operation of the Hubble Space Telescope and influential in all fields of astronomy. The GSC-2 team, led by Lasker, produced the largest astronomical catalog at the time of its release, containing information for nearly 1 billion objects.

Dr. Zasowski received a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia and has completed postdoctoral fellowships at Ohio State University and Johns Hopkins University. She uses the Milky Way as a laboratory for studying fine-scale details of galaxy evolution, using high-dimensional datasets to constrain chemo-dynamical substructure in galactic stellar populations and in the interstellar medium.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble science operations and is the mission and science operations center for the James Webb Space Telescope. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C.