Nick Konidaris is a staff scientist at the Carnegie Observatories and Instrument Lead for the SDSS-V Local Volume Mapper (LVM). He works on a broad range of new optical instrumentation projects in astronomy and remote sensing. Nick's projects range from experimental to large workhorse facilities. On the experimental side, he recently began working on a new development platform for the 40-inch Swope telescope at Carnegie's Las Campanas Observatory that will be used to explore and understand the explosive universe.
Nick and his colleagues at the Department of Global Ecology are leveraging the work on Swope to develop a new airborne spectrograph that will be used to provide a direct measurement of photosynthesis for plants here on Earth (and maybe beyond). In addition to these small and experimental projects, Nick is addicted to pushing the scientific grasps of instruments by leaps and bands. To that end he is working on a powerful infrared spectrograph for Las Campanas that will be an order-of-magnitude improvement over the previous generation of infrared spectrograph, which he worked on as a postdoc. In his role with SDSS-V, Konidaris is leading the development of the largest integral field unit (IFU) on the planet that will feed three optical spectrographs in both hemispheres.
Prior to Carnegie, he was director of product management at Kairos Aerospace in Mountain View, CA. Konidaris received a B.S. in physics from Carnegie Mellon University, and conducted coursework in electrical engineering before obtaining a Ph.D. in astrophysics from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He went on to be a postdoctoral scholar and staff member at Caltech, and then an optical engineer at Planet Labs before Kairos.
