Leadership

Hierarchical organizational structure at NOIRLab.

Top-Level conceptual organizational structure at NOIRLab showing the Programs (vertical) and cross-cutting matrixed Labor Pools and Services (horizontal).

Patrick McCarthy Director Patrick McCarthy is the former Vice President of the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization and an Astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science. McCarthy is a world-recognized astronomical leader; his seminal work on galaxy evolution and the high-redshift universe has earned him wide scientific respect and recognition. He has spent more than thirty years working with the NOIRLab facilities, as a frequent observer and as a member of advisory and oversight committees. McCarthy’s experience of large projects, including developing instruments for Hubble and his leadership roles in the Giant Magellan Telescope Project, will be invaluable as NOIRLab charts its path through the coming decade and beyond.
Stuartt Corder Deputy Director Stuartt Corder has a strong history of leadership in astronomy with more than 15 years of experience in building, operating, and further developing groundbreaking, large-scale, advanced scientific and technical programs and facilities. He has been in Chile for more than a decade, holding a number of senior leadership roles in the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observatory and NSF’s National Radio Astronomy Observatory. His research interests include planet and star formation, and synthesis imaging in interferometry.
Wendy Swartz Associate Director of Administration Swartz is an accomplished leader with over 20+ years of higher education administration experience focused on financial and business functions, operations, process management and improvement, and leadership. She has a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from the University of Dayton, and a Master of Administration from Northern Arizona University (NAU), and is also a Certified Public Accountant. Most recently she served as Associate Vice President for Financial Administration and Comptroller at NAU, where she was on staff from 2005 to 2023.
Scott Dahm International Gemini Observatory Interim Director Scott Dahm joined the International Gemini Observatory as Deputy Director January 2023 before being appointed Interim Director in January 2024. He received his PhD in astronomy from the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa under George Herbig, on the study of young stellar clusters. He subsequently served as an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech, a staff astronomer at W. M. Keck Observatory and as the Chief Scientist and acting Station Director for Naval Observatory, Flagstaff Station. Scott is also a retired US Naval Officer.
Lori Allen Mid-Scale Observatories (MSO) Director Lori Allen joined the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in 2009 from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics where she was a member of the IRAC instrument team for the Spitzer Space Telescope. Allen has served as Associate Director of Kitt Peak since 2014. In the position of Acting Director of NOAO, she was responsible for top level management of NOAO and continuing senior management of Kitt Peak. Allen received her PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and is a member of the Spitzer Science Center Oversight Committee and of the AAS Committee on Light Pollution, Radio Interference and Space Debris. Her research interests include wide-field surveys, star and planet formation, protoplanetary disk evolution, asteroids and galactic archaeology. Lori is Director of the Mid-Scale Observatories (MSO) which includes the Kitt Peak and Cerro Tololo Observatories.
Bob Blum Rubin Observatory Operations Director Bob Blum became Rubin Observatory Operations Director in October 2018 after 21 years at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, where he was Deputy Director for 10 years. Blum’s research interest is large survey science with a focus on studies of the Milky Way and the Local Volume. Prior to his role as Deputy Director, Blum spent 10 years at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile as a staff astronomer.
Tom Matheson Community Science and Data Center Interim Director Tom Matheson joined the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in 2004 as a staff astronomer in the U.S. National Gemini Office. Since 2017, he has been the Head of Time-Domain Services in the Community Science and Data Center, where he is the PI of the ANTARES time-domain event broker. Matheson received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 2000, with his thesis topic being spectroscopy of stripped-envelope supernovae. This was followed by a post-doctoral position at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. His research interests continue to focus on explosive astronomical events like supernovae and gamma-ray bursts, with forays into other areas of time-domain science, cosmology, and methods for calibration.
Michiel van der Hoeven Engineering Services Director Before becoming ES director, Michiel van der Hoeven was the Head of Engineering Operations at Gemini South Observatory. He led a group of technical professionals in charge of operating and maintaining the Gemini 8-meter telescope, the instruments and all associated systems. Previously, van der Hoeven worked at the La Palma observatory where he was responsible for starting up the first scientific operations of the GRANTECAN, Spain’s 10-meter segmented telescope. Prior to that, he worked as an instrumentation/mechanical engineer at the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes.
John Blakeslee Research and Science Services Director John Blakeslee joined NOIRLab following three years as the inaugural Chief Scientist of the International Gemini Observatory. Prior to that, he worked as a staff astronomer at Canada’s Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, a faculty member at Washington State University, and a Research Scientist with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys project at Johns Hopkins University. He completed his PhD at MIT using data collected over many nights on Kitt Peak and Cerro Tololo, and held postdoctoral fellowships at Caltech and Durham University. Blakeslee’s research focuses on galaxy clusters and cosmology.
Lucas Macri US-ELTP Director Lucas Macri came to NOIRLab in May 2023, having spent the previous 15 years as a professor of Astronomy at Texas A&M University where he also served as Associate Dean for Undergraduate Programs since 2017. He received his PhD in 2001 from Harvard University and held joint Hubble and Goldberg postdoctoral fellowships at NOAO between 2002 and 2008. His research interests are in the extragalactic distance scale and the search for electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational wave sources.