Jonathan Hargis

Dr. Jonathan Hargis is the Program Scientist for Data Management and Software within the Astrophysics Center at Schmidt Sciences. He is focused on developing open, highly scalable, low-latency data delivery systems for the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Observatory Systems, with the goal of supporting the ambitious science aims of the coming decade. Dr. Hargis is passionate about accelerating science with low barriers and bringing together multi-wavelength, multi-observatory observations to understand the universe.

Dr. Hargis previously served as the Deputy Lead for Barbara A. Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST), the petabyte-scale archive which serves data from twenty NASA astrophysics missions, including the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, Kepler/K2, TESS, the upcoming Roman Space Telescope. As a member of the Data Science Mission Office, Dr. Hargis was responsible for cloud-focused data systems, including overseeing the strategic direction for server-side data analytic Science Platforms. Dr. Hargis was a key member of NASA’s Fornax Initiative, a multi-year project to build cloud systems, cloud-ready software, and cloud standards across all NASA Astrophysics archives.

While at STScI, Dr. Hargis also served in management for six years with both data management and instrument teams. Most recently he was the Deputy Branch Manager of the Roman Telescope Branch instrument team, the group responsible for overseeing Roman’s Science Commissioning and developing the Wide Field Instrument’s imaging data calibrate pipeline algorithms.

Dr. Hargis’ science expertise is in understanding the formation and evolution of galaxies in a cosmological context using observations of their oldest stellar populations. He has more than seventy five publications covering a range of astrophysical scales — from testing models of the interiors of stars to studying our Milky Way’s halo to characterizing the globular cluster populations in nearby massive galaxies. He is a seasoned observational astronomer, having used numerous ground- and space-based facilities ranging from 40-cm to 4-m in his research. Dr. Hargis works primarily as a survey scientist, both in designing and executing surveys for specific science aims as well as leveraging existing data from wide-field sky surveys and astronomical archives.

Dr. Hargis holds Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in Astronomy from Indiana University as well as an M.S. in Astronomy from San Diego State University and B.A. in Astronomy from Eastern University (in collaboration with Villanova University). He was a Principal Mission Scientist at STScI and a Senior Postdoctoral Scholar at Haverford College prior to joining Schmidt Sciences.