2 UCI students named elite Hubble Fellows

The Orange County Register

April 16th, 2009

By Gary Robbins

The crew of the space shuttle Atlantis is scheduled
to perform the final upgrade on the Hubble
Space Telescope in May. Image courtesy of NASA.

Shelley Wright and Misty Bentz, a pair of postdocs at UC Irvine, have been named Hubble Fellows by NASA — one of the highest honors the space agency confers on scholars at that point in their careers.

NASA gives out only 15 such fellowships a year, and this time 2 went to post-docs at a campus where there are already 3 faculty members who previously won the awards (James Bullock, Betsy Barton and Aaron Barth).

Many prominent astronomers and astrophysicists, including Mike Bolte, head of the UC’s Lick Observatory, also were Hubble Fellows.

Shelley Wright

Bullock says Wright, “studies the assembly of galaxies so distant that we see them as they were 8 billion light years ago. She uses instruments on the Keck Telescope in Hawaii — instruments that she helped commission. Shelley is remarkable in her breadth: she is developing new astronomical instruments for the next generation of telescopes and figuring out how to use those instruments to inform our understanding of the universe.”

Misty Bentz

Bullock says Bentz “studies the properties of supermassive black holes, objects that have a total mass of about one million times the mass of our Sun. She is a world-leader in a particular technique known as ‘reverberation mapping’ and is helping to spearhead an unprecedented 64 night observatory project at Lick Observatory that involves astronomers from UCI, UCSB, UCR, UCB, and UCLA to study supermassive black holes in nearby galaxies.”