Dr. Keren Sharon

Biography

Keren Sharon is an Associate Professor and the Associate Chair at the University of Michigan's Department of Astronomy. Her research focuses on strong gravitational lensing, a phenomenon where massive structures bend light from objects behind them, effectively acting as natural telescopes. Sharon's team analyzes the gravitational lensing signals from groups and clusters of galaxies to model the mass distribution of these massive structures. They study how lensing clusters magnify the properties of background galaxies, allowing unprecedented detail in examining distant galaxies. Notably, her group discovered the largest multiplicity of high-redshift lensed quasar in 2013 and secured seven orbits of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) in 2014 to observe a unique lensing system. The group has completed significant HST programs and is currently preparing results from their observations. Sharon has also been involved with the Hubble Frontier Fields project, where her team has computed preliminary lens models. She holds a Bachelor and PhD from Tel Aviv University, and has been a Kavli Postdoctoral Fellow at the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago.

Research Interests

Courses