Welcome to Michael McCrackan who comes to us from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is a postdoctoral associate, and a member of Wright Lab, working with with Professor Laura Newburgh in Cosmology and Cosmic Microwave Background science. He is a member of the Simons Observatory (SO) Collaboration, where his focus is on analyzing the time-ordered data for both the Small Aperture Telescopes (SAT) and the Large Aperture Telescope (LAT) while developing and optimizing the data reduction algorithms of the SO time-ordered data reduction pipeline (sotodlib/so3g).
McCrackan earned his Bachelor of Science from the University of New Mexico in 2015. He completed his PhD in 2024 at the University of Massachusetts Amherst under the mentorship of Professor Grant Wilson. His dissertation focused on developing the data reduction and mapmaking pipeline for the TolTEC millimeter camera on the Large Millimeter Telescope. Additionally, he developed a general-purpose hierarchical Bayesian fitting framework to model and map the dust content in local dwarf galaxies, serving as analogs for high-redshift early galaxies.