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Upcoming Speaker Biography

Gregory Wirth
Wednesday, September 27th, 2023

Your guide for this adventure is Dr. Gregory Wirth, an avid astronomer with a passion for sharing his love of the sky with the public.  Inspired by witnessing a partial solar eclipse while growing up in central Michgan, Greg first pursued his astronomical dreams at Northwestern University before heading west to earn his Ph.D. in Astronomy & Astrophysics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where his thesis exploited early data from the Hubble Space Telescope.

For 16 wonderful years, Greg was privileged to experience the welcoming "aloha spirit" on the Big Island of Hawaii. Working at the renowned W. M. Keck Observatory, he marveled at the pristine night skies atop the iconic Mauna Kea, home to the greatest collection of telescopes on the planet.  Drawn to the Rockies, his path eventually led him to Boulder where he embraced a new role as the Commissioning Scientist for the massive NSF-funded National Ecological Observatory Network. 

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Currently, Greg serves as an astronomer and systems engineer for Ball Aerospace, a leading American aerospace company headquartered in Boulder with a long history of contributing to key astrophysics missions like Hubble, Spitzer, Chanda, and Deep Impact. There, he contributed to the Roman Space Telescope program before seizing the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help commission the optical system of the James Webb Space Telescope after its highly anticipated launch.

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