HERA site visit, South Africa, 2017

HERA site visit, South Africa, 2017


Who I am

My name is Josh Dillon. I am a research scientist at UC Berkeley working on the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA). I was previously an NSF Astronomy & Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley working with Aaron Parsons. I did my Ph.D. at MIT in astrophysics, working with Max Tegmark and Jackie Hewitt. I grew up in Highland Park, Illinois and I graduated from Stanford in 2009, where I majored in physics and minored in history. I've been interested in physics since I was 13 and astrophysics since I attended the Summer Science Program in 2004.

      

What I do

I study the universe to learn about its origins, constituent components, and ultimate fate. Specifically, I am working on a new probe of the early universe that uses radio waves with a characteristic 21 cm wavelength to make precise measurements of the evolution during the time when the first stars and galaxies formed--the so-called "Cosmic Dawn."