Graduate Students: Mark Keremedjiev

Like most children his age, when he was eight, Mark Keremedjiev (Born in Pennsylvania, 1984; moved to Montana 1988) wanted to be an astronaut. For him this dream evolved into a true goal so when he was in high school he had the space program in his mind. “It was either being a scientist or going to the navy and becoming a pilot. I liked astrophysics and finally got in astronomy following this path,” Mark says.

Mark graduated cum laude in astrophysics at Cornell University in 2006. He was interested in instrumentation building so his advisor told him about the work of Stephen Eikenberry, a former Cornell professor at that time already in UF.

“I remember when I first met Steve,” Mark recalls, “He was really excited because he just got an NSF grant he was competing for with Caltech. He was very happy, pounding the table in excitement. At that moment I thought that I would really like to work with him.”

Once here, he got involved in a project to build a new type of instrument aimed to reduce the negative effect that the atmospheric turbulence has in ground based telescopes.
As Mark explains, telescopes work like a photo lens: the bigger they are, the more magnification you get. But this is only true until you reach about 15 centimetre diameter telescopes. Further on, the constant movement of the atmosphere degrades the images.

The instrument he worked on takes hundreds of pictures every second to compensate for these effects in real-time. This technique is called Speckle Stabilization. “I hope it can be used on 10 meter class telescopes. I’ve built a version that actually works and tested it in the 4.2 meter William Hershel telescope in the Canary Islands. I was able to conclude that when the instrument was on we got higher resolution that when it was off. That was the whole point of my thesis, to show that this is possible.”

Mark remembers the moment he realized that the instrument actually worked: “My best moment as a scientist so far: a very happy eureka moment. I started to dance and run around the control room in excitement. Was really neat, to see working something that just three years before was only a sketch in a piece of paper!”

Mark is also a musician, an athlete and likes to get involved in campus life. He was president of the Graduate Astronomy Organization and student representative in the Graduate Curriculum Committee.

He also joined astronomy department’s outreach efforts. “Our department does great work in outreach. I’ve been giving talks in schools to about five hundred students a year. It’s a great thing for us to do because people have such a fascination with astronomy that whatever you tell them, they become transfixed. When I was a child, I enjoyed similar talks too; in fourth grade we had an astronaut come to talk to my class. This was one of the most memorable events in my young life.”

Mark now has his PhD in Astronomy, and keeps the honest goal of becoming an astronaut. He even trained for and ran an Ironman race, with the objective of getting the necessary physical strength. Unfortunately, recent changes in the US space policy altered his plans. He is moving to Washington D.C. to pick up a government research position for twelve months with a prize fellowship from the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education. When it finishes he has been awarded an NSF international research fellowship to go work at the University of Cambridge on lucky imaging.

“For those thinking about graduate school, I’d say that now is a great time to come to Florida. There is an excellent faculty that covers a lot of research areas. Some of the graduate students starting right now will be using the 10 meter GTC telescope for their data and that is a very appealing thing. I’m really glad I came here. I had the opportunity to work with a great instrumentation person like Steve Eikenberry on a project in which I wasn’t just a cog in a wheel. If you go to other schools sometimes you’ll just be working on a subsystem of a piece of a part of a big instrument. Here, I did the simulations, the design work, the integration, the testing, the data analysis… I really got to do the whole thing and that is an experience you don’t get in many places.” says Dr. Keremedjiev.

Mark Keremedjiev graduated in May 2011.