4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena, CA 91109Spencer first became interested in cosmology as an undergrad at DePaul University working with data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) before joining the Dark Energy Survey (DES) as a PhD student at UC Santa Cruz. There he led the effort to characterize the many selection and measurement biases of the DES data with injected synthetic galaxies in order to help calibrate the cosmological analysis of the Year 3 (Y3) data release. In addition, he used archival X-ray measurements of galaxy clusters to help calibrate the inference of their masses from optical images and built a computational framework to handle the complex systematics modeling required for the Y3 cosmological measurement from clusters. Spencer has joined JPL to collaborate on the Superpressure Balloon-borne Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT) to make high-resolution cluster lensing measurements at a fraction of the cost of space telescopes.
Chair (1 year) and member (4 years) of the Early Career Scientist Committee of the Dark Energy Survey, UC Santa Cruz Undergraduate Mentor
Cosmology, dark energy, large-scale structure of the universe, galaxy clusters, gravitational lensing
Achievement Rewards for College Scientists (ARCS) Scholar (2020), DePaul Physics Student of the Year (2016)