Lunch with Astronomer Dr. Jack Orlowski-Scherer ’12
Dr. Jack Orlowski-Scherer ’12, is an astronomer working at the University of Pennsylvania on the Simons Observatory (SO), a next-generation Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) observatory.
At Peddie, Jack was a member of the inaugural EXP class, working with Dr. Darrin York at Rutgers on computational physical chemistry. After graduating, he attended the University of Chicago, where he studied physics and mathematics and worked on the South Pole Telescope under Dr. John Carlstrom. He also worked with Dr. Amit Lath on data analysis on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment. He attended graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, where he and fellow graduate student Ningfeng Zhu led the design of the SO Large Aperture Telescope Camera, the largest cryogenic camera in the world. His dissertation, “Cosmology via the Thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich Effect”, was supervised by Professor Mark Devlin and submitted in 2022.
After graduating, he took a Trottier Space Institute Fellowship at McGill University, where he worked on the ALBATROS very-low frequency radio telescope with professors Cynthia Chiang and Jon Sievers. He returned to the University of Pennsylvania in 2024, where he currently works as a staff scientist. His areas of interest include cryogenic instrumentation, the formation of large scale structure, feedback processes in galaxy clusters, and, most recently, the composition of asteroids. He lives in Philadelphia, where his hobbies include playing ultimate frisbee, which he learned on Frisbee Fridays with the Peddie swim team.
Jack will discuss his career path and research with interested students on November 4.