Doug Hoffman

Affiliation: NASA Ames Research Center

Email: douglas.hoffman@nasa.gov

Phone: 650-604-0378

Professional Biography

Dr. Doug Hoffman is the SOFIA Deputy Project Scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center since April 2021. He joined the SOFIA project in 2013 as a contractor, working on the systems verification and validation of the SOFIA telescope. Doug helped characterize and track the technical performance of the telescope pointing, image quality, and new observing modes. He was the first to prototype real-time astrometry software to improve pointing accuracy on SOFIA. Later in the project lifetime, Doug helped characterize the precipitable water vapor observed by SOFIA using science instrument and satellite data. He has served as a liaison between the engineering and astrophysics teams.

Prior to arriving at Ames, Doug served as a postdoctoral scholar at IPAC/Caltech with NASA’s WISE mission. His research interests included classifying time-variable stars that WISE observed, as well as characterizing the effect of stellar pulsations in binary star systems. Presently, he is involved in instrument characterization for concept missions, analysis of archived SOFIA data, and the science closeout of SOFIA. Doug grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, earned a B.S. in Physics from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D in Astronomy from New Mexico State University.

Education

Ph.D. Astronomy, New Mexico State University, 2009

B.S. Physics, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2004

Research Interests

Eclipsing binary stars, stellar pulsations, time-domain astronomy, stratospheric water vapor

Select Publications

SOFIA at Full Operation Capability: Technical Performance”, Journal of Astronomical Instrumentation, 2018, 7, 186

“The SOFIA Observatory at the Start of Routine Science Operations: Mission Capabilities and Performance”, The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, 2014, 212, 24

“Automated Classification of Periodic Variable Stars detected by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer”, The Astronomical Journal, 2014, 148, 21     

“A Preliminary Calibration of the RR Lyrae Period-Luminosity Relation at Mid-infrared Wavelengths: WISE Data”, The Astrophysical Journal, 2013, 776, 135

“Variability Flagging in the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer Preliminary Data Release”, The Astronomical Journal, 2012, 143, 118

“New beta Lyrae and Algol Candidates from the Northern Sky Variability Survey”, The Astronomical Journal, 2006, 136, 1067

“The Case for Third Bodies as the Cause for Changes in Selected Algol Systems”, The Astronomical Journal, 2006, 132, 2267

NASA Missions

SOFIA, WISE