Andrew Connolly

• Program

  LINCC Frameworks

• Institution

  University of Washington

Andrew Connolly is a professor of astronomy at the University of Washington and the
William P. and Ruth Gerberding University Professor. He is the Director of the eScience
Institute at the University of Washington (UW) that supports data science across the
UW campus. His work focuses on the development and application of statistics and
machine learning for large astronomical survey data sets. For the last decade, he has
worked on various aspects of the design and construction of the Vera C Rubin
Observatory that will operate the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). He was
awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2000 to develop
visualization techniques for complex data sets, which led to the creation of Google Sky
while on sabbatical at Google in 2007. In 2017 he founded the DIRAC Institute at the
University of Washington, a new center that focuses on data intensive astrophysics and
cosmology. From this emerged the LINCC Frameworks initiative (with co-PI Rachel
Mandelbaum) to develop robust and scalable software to support science from the
LSST. He co-authored the book “Statistics, Data Mining and Machine Learning in
Astronomy”, which was awarded the International Astrostatistics Association’s
Outstanding Publication Award for 2016.