Ewan Douglas

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An astronomer building space telescopes large and small – with a focus on directly imaging exoplanets: worlds around other stars


I will be joining the Univ. of Arizona’s Steward Observatory in Spring 2019. As a postdoctoral associate in Prof. Kerri Cahoy’s STAR Lab, part of MIT’s Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics, I am the payload engineer for the DeMi CubeSat to test deformable mirrors in space and enable the next generation of exoplanet imaging space telescopes.

DeMi CubeSat rendering, courtesy Blue Canyon Technologies Hubble Space Telescope, courtesy STScI
DeMi CubeSat rendering, courtesy Blue Canyon Technologies Hubble Space Telescope, courtesy STScI

My graduate work in astronomy at Boston University focused on integrating, relaunching, and understanding the PICTURE-B sounding rocket mission which demonstrated active wavefront sensing in space - an essential technology for stabilizing space telescope optics enough to sense reflected light from exoplanets against the billion times brighter signal from their host stars.

CAD Rendering of PICTURE payload PICTURE-B at WSMR, Courtesy NASA
PICTURE-B Payload PICTURE-B Integration at White Sands Missile Range (Courtesy NASA)

(Read more in my dissertation, Douglas 2016).

Other projects I have contributed to:

DWEL separating leafs from trunks, Douglas et al 2015 and first deployment RAIDS instrumented mounted on the ISS, Courtesy NASA
Dual-wavelength Echnida Lidar distinguishes leaves from trunks to quantify forest carbon uptake Remote Atmospheric and Ionospheric Detection System mounted on the International Space Statio

Before graduate school, I worked at LIGO Hanford Observatory.

Many summers, I have a blast teaching the talented students at Astronomy Camp.

I am committed to enabling access to research tools through using open source programming languages and contributing to open source scientific libraries. Please find examples, such as Physical Optics Propagation in PYthon, on my GitHub profile.

My scientific publications are listed on my Google Scholar Profile or the ADS:

GitHub | Google Scholar | Astrophysics Data System

Stars and clouds over the Magellan Telescopes, Las Campanas Observatory. Photo by Ewan Douglas, Aug 2017.

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