Rachel Street
Las Cumbres Observatory
Research Focus
About Rachel
I’m a Staff Scientist at Las Cumbres Observatory (https://lco.global), where I lead the microlensing science group. Our primary focus is on using this fascinating technique to discover exoplanets and isolated black holes. The NSF’s Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will be a superb discovery engine for microlensing, and I am closely involved in preparations for this survey as co-chair of the Transients and Variable Stars Science Collaboration for LSST (https://lsst-tvssc.github.io/).
Microlensing is a transient phenomenon, which makes it particularly demanding to observe. I have developed software tools to automate our observing program, called Target and Observation Managers or TOM systems. These are extremely powerful for all observing programs, so I work closely with LCO’s software team to develop the TOM Toolkit (https://lco.global/tomtoolkit/), a package that enables everyone to build these tools for their science.
Honors
2010 - Group Achievement Award for the SuperWASP Exoplanet Project, Royal Astronomical Society
2003-2007 - PPARC Post-doctoral Fellow, Queen's University Belfast
Education
Postdoc
LCO, University of California, Santa Barbara, 02/2007 - 02/2009
Astrophysics Research Centre, Queen's University, Belfast, 09/2002 - 02/2007
Ph.D.
Astronomy, University of St. Andrews, UK, 6/2002
Master's
Physics with Astrophysics, University of Birmingham, UK, 9/1998
Bachelor's
Physics with Astrophysics, University of Birmingham, UK, 09/1998
