Dr. Niall Gaffney

Biography

Niall Gaffney's background primarily revolves around the management and utilization of large inhomogeneous scientific datasets. He earned B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin and joined the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) in 2013. His focus is on creating environments that foster data practices improving metadata, data processing, analysis, and reuse. He aims to enhance researchers' data practices to accelerate outcomes that feed into Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence applications, which are becoming broadly adopted in science and engineering research fields. With 13 years as a designer and developer at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), he holds data from the Hubble Space Telescope, Kepler, and James Webb Space Telescope missions, and has been a leader in developing the Hubble Legacy Archive, a project that harvested over 20 years of Hubble data to create sensitive astronomical data products available for open research. Prior to his work at STScI, Niall contributed to the Hobby Eberly Telescope (HET) project at the McDonald Observatory in west Texas, where he started his work in planning experiments and cataloging the data produced by HET.

Research Interests

Experience