Dr. Kyler Kuehn

Cosmology

PhD University of California, Irvine, 2007

kkuehn@lowell.edu

 

Dr, Kyler Kuehn oversees management of Lowell Observatory’s science telescopes and related equipment while actively pursuing both observational and instrumentation research.

Dr. Kuehn joined Lowell Observatory’s science staff in 2019. He received his PhD from the University of California, Irvine in 2007, where he focused on the study of high-energy neutrinos from gamma-ray bursts using the AMANDA and IceCube detectors at the South Pole. He went on to serve as a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics at the Ohio State University, as well as the High Energy Physics Division of Argonne National Laboratory, where he helped to design and build the Dark Energy Camera, a 570-Megapixel detector currently installed on the 4-meter Blanco Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. Subsequently, he moved to the Australian Astronomical Observatory (AAO) in Sydney, Australia, where he was the Project Scientist and Project Manager for the TAIPAN and MANIFEST instruments. Both of these instruments make use of a novel fiber-positioning technology known as “Starbugs” for massively-multiplexed optical spectroscopy. MANIFEST will be installed on one of the largest telescopes on the planet–the Giant Magellan Telescope– near the end of the decade.

After spending six years at the AAO, Dr. Kuehn moved to Lowell Observatory, where he is now the Director of Technology. In terms of his current research, he is part of the team performing the Southern Stellar Stream Spectroscopic Survey (S5) on the Anglo-Australian Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory. He is also developing photonic technologies to improve the capabilities of ground-based infrared telescopes.