Studying the physics of galaxies
Assistant Professor of Astronomy Evan Kirby arrived on campus in August. Born and raised in New Orleans, Kirby earned his BS in 2004 from Stanford University; his undergraduate thesis involved trips to Pasadena to test an instrument built by JPL's Jamie Bock, now also a Caltech professor of physics, and the late Andrew Lange, the Marvin L. Goldberger Professor of Physics at Caltech. Kirby earned his MS and PhD degrees from UC Santa Cruz in 2006 and 2009. His PhD thesis involved an analysis of the spectra of bright stars in dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way. Then as a Caltech postdoc and Hubble Fellow from 2009 to 2012, he moved on to more distant stars in Andromeda and its satellite galaxies. As a Center for Galaxy Evolution Fellow at UC Irvine from 2012 to 2014, he shifted the focus of his spectral analyses from chemical makeups to stellar...
