Schmidt Futures Grants Lehman Astrophysicist $2.94 Million USD For Study of Quasars, Black Holes

BRONX, N.Y. – (August , 2020) – A Lehman College astrophysicist has been awarded a $2.94 million grant by Schmidt Futures, for a five-year study about the structure and evolution of the universe, black holes, quasars and dark energy.

Schmidt Futures is a philanthropic initiative, founded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt. Eric Schmidt is the former CEO of Google. The grant will award $1.8 million directly to Lehman College and the remainder as a subaward to the University of Montreal.

“This by far is the biggest project we’ve ever attempted,” said Matthew O’Dowd, an associate professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department and writer and host of PBS Space Time. “It’s quite ambitious…and will define the next five years of our scientific lives.”

O’Dowd will lead a team of researchers and students from Lehman, the Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC) and the University of Montreal as they study data collected from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory (previously referred to as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), currently under construction on Cerro Pachón in Chile. It is an 8-meter-class telescope coupled to a 3.2-gigapixel camera – the world’s largest digital camera ever fabricated for optical astronomy.

The observatory, the first in the U.S. to be named after a woman, will survey the entire sky of the Southern Hemisphere every three days for the next decade, O’Dowd said, and will map the dynamic nature of the universe. Each single snapshot will cover an area 40 times the size of the full moon.

O’Dowd’s team will develop a machine-learning pipeline (also known as artificial intelligence) for the observatory “to analyze the flickerings of thousands of distant quasars whose light in the very distant universe is powered by violent storms of matter falling into gigantic black holes,” he said.

Due to the enormous dataset and the non-linearity of the problem, machine learning methods are the only viable method for integrating these effects into a model and analyzing thousands of quasars in real time.

“I believe I have assembled the only people in the world who can do this before LSST begins operation, including some machine learning leaders who have just taken faculty jobs at the University of Montreal,” he said. “So that’s our plan: to develop new machine-learning techniques and build them into an analysis pipeline for (the observatory).”

“People are fascinated by these things and we hope to extend their curiosity about the wonders of the universe,” O’Dowd said.

Once the team begins work, O’Dowd will invite Lehman graduates, post-doctoral fellows and current Lehman undergraduates to participate in the project.

“This project is exciting and will help us attract excellent grad students and if it also helps influence other students to come to Lehman, then that’s fantastic,” he said.

“This is an excellent project that will push the limits of precision of measurement and very difficult computing to clarify important questions in cosmology and high-energy astrophysics,” said Stuart Feldman, chief scientist of Schmidt Futures. “We are delighted to support this path breaking work.”

“This is an incredibly prestigious award and we are incredibly proud of Matt,” said Dr. Pamela Mills, dean of the College’s School of Natural and Social Sciences. “He is very good at communicating science and is an amazing physicist. He is, and has been tapped, as one our young leaders.”