Howard Isaacson
Senior Research Astronomer at University of California, Berkeley
San Francisco Bay Area United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolHoward Isaacson is a senior research astronomer with over a decade of experience leading observational programs that detect and characterize exoplanets and stellar-mass black holes. He coordinates high-precision radial-velocity campaigns for the California Planet Search at Lick and Keck, develops spectral-analysis pipelines, and integrates Kepler and TESS photometry with ground-based follow-up to probe Earth-sized planets and system architectures. As a key member of the Moving Universe Lab, he is building tools and a SkyPortal-based web portal to enable Roman-era microlensing searches for isolated black holes, positioning his work at the intersection of instrumentation, survey strategy, and software. He also created a widely used tutorials suite that teaches students the practical skills needed to enter astronomy research, reflecting a strong commitment to training the next generation. Increasingly engaged with aerospace applications, he explores CubeSats, discovery constellations, and instrument concepts that bridge scientific goals with mission engineering.
9 years of coding experience
MS, Physics & Astronomy, MS, Physics & Astronomy at San Francisco State UniversityDoctor of Philosophy - PhD , Astronomy and Astrophysics, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD , Astronomy and Astrophysics at University of Southern Queensland
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (10)
astronomy7
radial7
machine-learning6
python5
orbital-mechanics5
random-walk4
simulation4
velocity4
modeling4
bayesian3
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
California-Planet-Search/cks-website
Jun 2017 - Jan 2024
Contributions:6 pushes in 6 years 8 months
howardisaacson/Intro-to-Astro-2020
May 2020 - Aug 2020
Contributions:43 commits, 43 pushes, 1 branch in 2 months
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