Paul Martini, Ph.D., Professor of Astronomy, Ohio State University; and 2020-2021 William Bentinck-Smith Fellow, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Research.

Dr. Martini appeared on Science for the Public's Contemporary Science Issues and Innovations program August 28, 2020 (via zoom). He discussed the challenge for astronomers of measuring and explaining the acceleration of cosmic expansion. He also explained the development of the sophisticated instruments used to study cosmic expansion, and especially the much-anticipated Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI).

Dr. Martini's research in observational cosmology focuses on the formation and evolution of galaxies and the evolution of supermassive black holes, particularly quasars. His work combines data from the Dark Energy Survey and the OzDES Project to measure the masses of supermassive black holes via the reverberation mapping technique.

Dr. Martini is very involved in the design and testing of astronomy instrumentation, and especially for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), for which he serves as Instrument Scientist. This is a major new instrument for the Mayall 4-m telescope that will conduct a redshift survey of over 35 million galaxies and quasars to study the origin of cosmic acceleration. He is particularly interested in measurements of the baryon acoustic oscillation signal with high-redshift quasars.
My other interests include .