Andrew Sheinis

Center for Adaptive Optics at UCSC and Lick Observatory

I did my Ph.D. in Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Lick Observatory, working with Joe Miller. My thesis was "ESI and Spectroscopy of QSO Host Galaxies" . The continuing goal of my thesis research is to increase our understanding of the environments in which QSO's are born and live. Currently I am using spectroscopy to understand the nature of the gas and stars in the galaxies hosting QSO's. This spectroscopy is in three areas: 1) The emission line properties of these galaxies, i.e. ionization content, gas fraction, temperatures and velocities. 2) The absorption line properties of these galaxies i.e. age , metalicity , and kinematics of the stellar populations in comparison to synthesized spectra. 3) Continuum studies and the nature of the "featureless continuum' that we observe in some of these objects. We have taken detailed optical spectra of the hosts of 20 QSO's, using LRIS and ESI at the Keck telescope.

I also work on Astronomical instrumentation development. On the instrumentation side, I served as a Project engineer on the development of the Echelle Spectrograph and Imager (ESI) here at the Instrument Lab. For ESI, I designed most of the translating and locating mechanisms, many of the optical mounts , was responsible for the assembly and testing of the science camera, and overall optical alignment of the entire system. I have built an image slicer type Integral field Unit (IFU) for ESI. In addition I hold two US patents for "optics for medical lasers". If you are really curious, they can be viewed below.