Daniel Jaffe

Daniel Jaffe is the Jane and Roland Blumberg Professor in the Department of Astronomy at The University of Texas at Austin. Outside of UT Austin, he serves as the President of the GMTO Corporation, the nonprofit organization responsible for the construction and future operation of the Giant Magellan Telescope. Prof. Jaffe received his BA and PhD from Harvard University and held positions as an Enrico Fermi Fellow at the University of Chicago and an Assistant Research Scientist at UC Berkeley before joining the UT faculty.  Jaffe's research encompasses device development, instrumentation, and observations geared toward understanding how stars and planetary systems form and evolve.  His group constructs silicon diffractive optics using precision lithography and currently has devices on instruments for NASA's SOFIA airborne observatory and James Webb Space Telescope (the successor to Hubble), as well as several ground-based instruments.  His team's IGRINS spectrograph operates at McDonald Observatory and the team is now designing an instrument for the Giant Magellan Telescope.  Prof. Jaffe's astronomical research employs high resolution infrared spectroscopy to look at the properties of protostars and of the disks around them that are forming planets. Prof. Jaffe has been awarded Harvard's Bart J. Bok prize, a Humboldt Fellowship, and a David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship.  He was Chair of UT's Astronomy Department from 2011 to 2015.

Dan Jaffe is involved in the development of infrared spectroscopic instrumentation and devices and in studies of protostars and star forming molecular clouds. At the University of Chicago and UC Berkeley, he worked on imagers and heterodyne spectrometers for the 350 µm and 450 µm atmospheric windows. At the University of Texas, he has developed two instruments for studies of the large-scale molecular ISM: a reimager for the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory and a near-IR Fabry-Perot spectrometer for observations of H2. He is a co-investigator on a mid-IR spectrograph for SOFIA (EXES: J. Lacy, PI) and a similar spectrograph currently in use on Gemini North (TEXES).

He has an ongoing program for the production of micromachined silicon diffractive devices, including both grisms and immersion gratings for infrared spectroscopy. Most recently, his group has delivered a set of silicon micromachined grisms for use in the FORCAST instrument on SOFIA, a set of grisms for the JWST NIRCam, and  immersion gratings for the IRTF instrument ISHELL and for IGRINS2, a facility instrument at the Gemini North 8m telescope. He is PI for IGRINS, a high resolution near-IR spectrometer at the McDonald 2.7m telescope, built in collaboration with the Korea Asronomy and Space Science Institute and has served as PI for 1-5 micron high resolution spectrograph for the Giant Magellan Telescope. His current astronomical research includes large-scale studies of photodissociation regions in molecular clouds, studies of very low mass young brown dwarfs, and high-resolution infrared spectroscopy of protostars and protoplanetary systems across the mass spectrum.

As president of the GMTO, Jaffe leads a team to design and construct the 25 meter diameter Giant Magellan Telescope for deployment in Chile in the 2030s.

Research Areas: Star Formation & Protoplanetary Disks, Spitzer Legacy Project: c2d, HII Regions & Planetary Nebulae, IGRINS, Micromachined Silicon Diffractive Optics, GMTNIRS, EXES: mid-IR spectrograph