Casey Papovich

Casey Papovich joined the Texas A&M University Department of Physics and Astronomy in 2008. He is a professor in the George P. and Cynthia Woods Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy and co-holder of the Marsha L. '69 and Ralph F. Schilling '68 Chair in Experimental Physics. His research focuses on observational cosmology, the formation and evolution of the most distant galaxies, and the growth of large scale structures of galaxies. In his work, Papovich utilizes data from all of NASA's space-based Great Observatories (Hubble, Spitzer, and Chandra), the NASA/European Space Agency Herschel Space Observatory, and the largest terrestrial telescopes, including the Gemini Observatory, Magellan Telescopes, Keck Observatory, and the ALMA Observatory. He is the project scientist for GMACS, the primary wide-field spectrograph being built for the Giant Magellan Telescope, in which Texas A&M University is a founding partner. He is involved in multiple international collaborations, including the ZFOURGE, CANDELS, Hobby Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX), HerS, Dark Energy Survey (DES), and Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) projects. In 2013 Papovich was part of a team that discovered the universe's most distant galaxy ever — a breakthrough deemed one of Texas Monthly's top five Texas-based scientific discoveries for 2013.