Title
Associate Professor

Department
Dept of Astronomy


Faculty URL
https://astro.berkeley.edu/faculty-profile/jessica-lu

Research Group
https://jluastro.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/MULab/overview

Email
jlu.astro@berkeley.edu


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Research Expertise and Interest
black holes, star and cluster formation, galactic centers, adaptive optics, astronomy, infrared instrumentation

Research Description
Jessica Lu's research group is conducting a search for free-floating stellar-mass black holes in the Milky Way using photometric and astrometric microlensing. Her group also studies how star formation changes in extreme environments such as in massive young clusters and the Galactic Center. These areas of research require high-precision astrometry and high resolution infrared images from space telescopes and ground-based telescopes equipped with adaptive optics (AO). Prof. Lu works on several instrumentation teams that aim to improve AO on the ground and infrared astrometry from space, including the Thirty Meter Telescope IRIS instrument, the 'imaka project to test very wide-field AO, the W.M. Keck AO system, and the Roman Space Telescope Astrometry working group.