WIYN 3.5m Observatory

New WIYN Director, Dr. Patricia Knezek

It is with great pleasure that the WIYN Board announces the appointment of Dr. Patricia M. Knezek as the Director of the WIYN Observatory, effective retroactively from February 15, 2011 until December 31, 2012. Dr. Knezek had been acting as Interim WIYN Director since December 1, 2010.

Dr. Knezek has a strong history of service at WIYN. She was initially hired as the WIYN instrumentation project scientist in 2001 and became WIYN's Deputy Director. In this capacity she led successful projects to improve WIYN's spectroscopic capabilities and now is focusing on providing major enhancements to its effectiveness as an astronomical imaging telescope.

Dr. Knezek obtained her Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1993. She subsequently held a postdoctoral position at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and later moved to scientist positions at the Carnegie Institution of Washington Observatories in Pasadena, The Johns Hopkins University, and the Space Telescope Science Institute, before joining the WIYN staff in 2001. Since 2005 she has also simultaneously held an appointment as Associate Scientist at the National Optical Astronomy Observatories.

Dr. Knezek's research is aimed at exploring the nature of galaxies that have been ineffective at making stars. Such systems are rich in gas, but because they have few stars, are optically faint and difficult to study. They are astronomical versions of coelacanths (the "dinofish") in existing in the present by representing evolutionary phases of the universe that for most galaxies are far in their pasts. In this field she also studies the nature of related classes of low mass galaxies, which are leaping their evolutionary clocks forwards through bursts of star formation.