Lucy Fortson

Entrevista: 17/12/2015

https://archive.org/details/LucyFortsonAdler.zooniverse

Web:https://www.physics.umn.edu/people/fortson.html

Dr. Fortson became a member of the School of Physics and Astronomy in 2010. Prior to her appointment to the faculty at the U, she was on the Astronomy Faculty at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, Illinois for thirteen years, most recently as the Vice President for Research. She was also a Senior Research Associate at the University of Chicago during this time. Dr. Fortson received her PhD in 1991 from UCLA in high energy physics for work she did at the CERN particle accelerator in Geneva, Switzerland probing the existence of high-mass cousins to the top quark. Returning to the United States, she began work at the University of Chicago on cosmic ray and gamma ray astrophysics with the Chicago Air Shower Array. As a post-doc, she led the CASA-BLANCA experiment studying the composition of very high energy galactic cosmic rays. She has been with the VERITAS collaboration since 2000. A founding member of the Zooniverse project (www.zooniverse.org), and current Board Chair for the Citizen Science Alliance, Dr. Fortson is also a leading expert in the field of “crowdsourcing science”. She has served on numerous national committees including the National Academy of Sciences Astronomy 2010 Decadel Survey, the Astrophysics Science Subcommittee and the Human Capital Committee of the NASA Advisory Council (NAC), the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate Advisory Committee (MPSAC) for the National Science Foundation and the Education and Public Outreach Review Committee for the National Optical Astronomy Observatory. Summary of Interests High-energy astrophysics, gamma-ray astronomy, extragalactic astronomy including active galactic nuclei and barred spirals; Developing online citizen science as a method to solve research problems with large datasets; physics education research.