Rachel Mandelbaum: Then and Now / 2012 Early Career Award Winner

The Department of Energy's Office of Science interviewed Rachel Mandelbaum, a professor of physics at Carnegie Mellon University, to see how a DOE Early Career Research Program award in 2012 affected her trajectory. For more information, visit the the original story on the DOE website.
 

What did the 2012 Early Career Award Allow You To Do?
 

My work focuses on understanding the physics governing the second half of the age of the Universe, using imaging data from large sky surveys.

These sky surveys are undertaken over a period of many years with powerful telescopes. They let us ask questions like "Why has the universe's expansion started to accelerate in the past ~7 billion years?" Current answers to this question point to "dark energy," a dominant but mysterious energy component in the universe. 

Data from the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) can help us better answer this and other fundamental questions about the universe – if we have the right tools and methods to accurately analyze the data. More specifically, I work on preparing to measure weak gravitational lensing. This is the tiny but coherent deflections of light from distant galaxies due to the gravitational influence of dark matter and visible matter (such as galaxies) that the light rays pass by on their way to Earth. From there, we learn about the nature and amount of dark energy.

I received the DOE Early Career Award when I was just establishing my research program at Carnegie Mellon University. It enabled me to establish a research group at the forefront of the international weak lensing research community. We were leaders both in preparing for the LSST and in applying our methods to existing datasets (which ultimately determines how we analyze LSST data).

When I received the Early Career Award, I was co-lead of the weak lensing working group within the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration (DESC). After three years in that role, I became the collaboration's Analysis Coordinator, providing oversight to all science working groups for the following four years. Next, I served a two-year term as collaboration spokesperson. After my spokesperson term, I have remained an active member of the collaboration's scientific effort and hold several service roles

The Early Career Award was crucial in enabling me to dedicate my skills and time to DESC during a critical time in the collaboration's development.