ABOUT Aaron Parsons
Aaron Parsons is a professor of astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he designs and uses radio telescopes to search for the first stars in the universe.
His degrees include an AS from Colorado Northwestern Community College (earned while in high school), a BA from Harvard in Physics and Mathematics, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in Astrophysics. He has been nationally recognized with awards that include the NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship, the Charles Towns Fellowship, the NSF CAREER Award, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers—the “highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers beginning their independent careers.”
He is the Director of the Radio Astronomy Laboratory, and the Principal Investigator of the Precision Array to Probe the Epoch of Reionization (PAPER), the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA), and the Electromagnetically Isolated Global Signal Estimation Platform (EIGSEP).
He is also the author of the fiction novel Coherence, the developer of the website Astrobaki, and the author of numerous educational videos.
In his spare time, he enjoys the outdoors, racquet sports, painting, and playing music.