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Aaron Parsons is currently a Professor in the Department of Astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in cosmology, radio astronomy, and radio instrumentation. He obtained his A.S. from Colorado Northwestern Community College in 1998 and then went on to earn a B.A. in Physics and Mathematics from Harvard University in 2002, working alongside Paul Horowitz. From 2002 to 2004, he was a Development Engineer at the Space Sciences Laboratory under Dan Werthimer. He received his Ph.D. in 2009 from UC Berkeley, where he worked with Don Backer, and spent two years as a Predoctoral Researcher at the Arecibo Observatory. Following this, he held an NSF postdoctoral fellowship and was recognized as a Charles Townes Fellow at UC Berkeley before joining the faculty in 2011. He received the NSF CAREER Award in 2014 and was honored with the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2019. In 2020, he served as Faculty Director of the Radio Astronomy Laboratory (RAL) and is a Principal Investigator for the Hydrogen Epoch Reionization Array (HERA). He co-founded the Collaboration for Astronomy Signal Processing and Electronics Research (CASPER).
University of California, Berkeley • Berkeley, CA
Teaching and conducting research in Astronomy, focusing on cosmology and radio instrumentation.
Space Sciences Laboratory • Berkeley, CA
Worked on engineering projects related to space sciences.
Arecibo Observatory • Arecibo, Puerto Rico
Conducted research in cosmology and radio astronomy.
The Mathematics Subject GRE is required for the Fall 2026 admissions cycle. General GRE is optional.