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Dr. Jeff Morgenthaler
Senior Scientist
Research Interests
Dr. Jeff Morgenthaler likes to think of himelf as an experimental physicist whose laboratory opens to the sky. He has used a comet to measure the ionization lifetime of carbon, is using Io's atmosphere as a probe of conditions in Jupiter's magnetosphere and has constructed a small-aperture coronagraph to monitor measure Jupiter's magnetospheric response to a large volcanic eruption on Io (see press release reporting large eruption in 2018). This coronagraph also records spectactular images of Mercury's sodium tail and comet NEOWISE in sodium.
Professional History
Dr. Morgenthaler received his PhD in 1998 from the University of Wisconsin where he studied the spectrum of the diffuse X-ray background with a Space Shuttle Payload of Opportunity and a sounding rocket employing one of the first single-photon calorimetric X-ray detectors. He was subsequently a National Research Council Fellow at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center where he studied the Io plasma torus and created the Parameterized Function Object system, a robust function fitting package that can be used with AI techniques to emulate the decisions of an intelligent data analyst (https://github.com/jpmorgen). Then he was a Research Scientist at the University of Washington for about 4 years studying comets. In 2008, he joined PSI. In 2011, he became responsible for leading PSI's internal proposal review (Red Team) program. In 2017 he became the PSI Observatory manager.
Honors and Awards
2017 NASA Group Achievement Award: Dawn\Gamma-Ray and Neutron Detector Team
2003 NASA Astrobiology Institute Insight Course: Intro. the Microbial World
1996 Goddard Space Flight Center Group Award (X-ray Quantum Calorimeter)
1993 Department of Education Fellowship
1989 Sigma Pi Sigma Physics Honor Society
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