Joe Jensen
Joe Jensen
Managing Editor
I am an astronomer and educator enthusiastic about sharing the wonders of the universe with my students. As a teenager, I enjoyed showing my family and friends interesting objects in the night sky like Halley’s Comet with my 14″ Newtonian reflector. When I went to college at Caltech, I studied astronomy and got a taste for observing with large telescopes at the Palomar Observatory 200″ Hale Telescope. I attended graduate school at the University of Hawaii and got my Ph.D. in observational infrared astronomy, working at many of the large telescopes located at 14,000 feet on Mauna Kea. When I finished, I started a job at the Gemini Observatory, which at the time was still under construction. I spent 12 years at Gemini, commissioning new instruments, helping observers, and traveling around the world to promote international collaboration in astronomy. Today I am a professor of physics and astronomy at Utah Valley University, where I share those experiences with hundreds of undergraduate students every year. My astronomy research centers around the extragalactic distance scale, trying to understand the size of the universe so we can understand where we came from and predict how it will evolve in the future. I also enjoy studying how stars evolve in the oldest, most massive galaxies in the universe. It is my privilege to contribute to the ASP’s mission by publishing many of the latest astronomical results in the ASP’s Conference Series, which attempts to capture and communicate the most recent advances in astronomy and share them with the professional astronomical community around the world.
