Tom Murphy
I am a postdoctoral scholar in physics at the University of Washington in Seattle. Or am I in astronomy? It's hard to tell. Not letting the confusion stop there, I have accepted an assistant professor position at UCSD, which I will begin in the Fall of 2003. What does that make me now?
Classes
Recent Career History
I came to UW in September 2000, after finishing a PhD at Caltech, where I was in the physics department doing infrared astronomy. As a thesis project, I built a novel, cryogenic integral field spectrograph for the Palomar 200-inch Telescope. With this instrument I looked at "Ultraluminous Infrared Galaxies", which are massive galaxies in the process of colliding/merging. The three-dimensional datacubes generated by PIFS enabled me to untangle the merger geometry in a few cases, allowing an understanding of the evolutionary state (i.e., merger age, orbital geometry, etc.) of the mergers. For a breif outline and access to electronic versions of my thesis, please check out my thesis page.
I have switched gears somewhat to work on an exciting initiative to shoot lasers at the moon for the purpose of performing a precision test of General Relativity. I am working with Chris Stubbs and Eric Adelberger (of the Eöt-Wash Gravity Group) on a project called APOLLO (Apache Point Observatory Lunar Laser-ranging Operation), which will utilize the 3.5 meter telescope at Apache Point in southern New Mexico to bounce a laser pulse off the retro-reflector arrays left on the lunar surface by the Apollo astronauts.
What do I think about the APOLLO project? Switching gears? Thanks to the article by Jim Austin in Science Magazine's Next-Wave online news-source, you can read all about it!