Expertise

Topics:  Astrophysics, Cosmology, Galaxies

Industries: Aerospace

Rachel Mandelbaum is a Professor of Physics at Carnegie Mellon University. An observational cosmologist, she is a member of the McWilliams Center for Cosmology and Astrophysics.

Mandelbaum earned her PhD in Physics from Princeton University in 2006, then was a Hubble Fellow for astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Study and an associate research scholar in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University. She moved to Carnegie Mellon University in 2012 and has been Department Head in Physics since 2024.

Mandelbaum’s research interests are in the areas of observational cosmology and galaxy studies that constrain our cosmological model, reveal the nature of dark matter and dark energy, and unveil the connection between dark matter and galaxies. Over the course of her career she has moved from carrying out such studies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), to the Hyper Suprime-Cam Survey (HSC), and is now preparing for the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. In recent years she has dedicated significant effort towards collaboration leadership, the development of open source software for astronomical simulation and data analysis, and the development of novel analysis tools using machine learning. For example, she has been one of the lead developers of the GalSim library used for image simulations by all current optical and infrared imaging surveys, and is co-PI of the LINCC Frameworks initiative, which is supported by Schmidt Sciences to develop open-source analysis infrastructure for LSST. Much of her work on LSST is carried out within the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration, for which she previously served as Analysis Coordinator (2015-2019) and then Spokesperson (2019-2021), but also as part of the Rubin commissioning team and the Rubin Survey Cadence Optimization Committee (SCOC).

Major recognitions of Mandelbaum’s work include the AAS Annie Jump Cannon Prize, the Department of Energy Early Career Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, a Simons Investigator Award, and selection as a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Media Experience

Genesis Mission Takes on Astronomy’s Growing Computing Challenge  — HPCwire
HPCwire interviewed Dr. Rachel Mandelbaum, professor of physics and head of the Department of Physics at CMU, about her Genesis Mission project. We discussed why existing approaches are becoming difficult at this scale, how the project could make it easier to work across different astronomical datasets, and the potential role of AI and foundation models.

CMU professor leads research project for Dept. of Energy’s Genesis Mission  — Times of Israel
“Our team is working on data infrastructure that is going to make it easier for researchers to apply AI to data from multiple sky surveys,” Mandelbaum offered.

Carnegie Mellon Researchers Lead Three DOE Genesis Mission Awards to Advance the Future of AI-Enabled Scientific Discovery  — Carnegie Mellon University Profile
CMU researchers, led by Rachel Mandelbaum, head of the Department of Physics at CMU’s Mellon College of Science and member of the McWilliams Center for Cosmology and Astrophysics, with partners from the University of Washington and collaborators from SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, will develop AI-enabled infrastructure that will make it easier for scientists to combine and analyze data from some of the world's largest astronomy experiments.

CMU now offers track in quantum physics, thanks to advocacy from a student  — Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
These tracks allow students to complete their general degree while gaining additional expertise in an area they’re interested in, said Rachel Mandelbaum, CMU professor and interim head of the physics department.

CMU hosts first-ever Physics Slam  — The Tartan
Then, Professor Rachel Mandelbaum introduced the audience to weak gravitational lensing, a measurement using data gained from large sky surveys. Weak gravitational lensing can be used to measure masses, specifically of dark matter in the universe. Her lab uses data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and the Hyper-SuprimeCam (HSC), which capture detailed images of the galaxy. Professor Mandelbaum’s research asks questions like, “How is dark matter distributed in the universe?” and “What are the main components of the universe?”

Jewish cosmologist is a star at CMU  — The Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle
Rachel Mandelbaum has always asked why. “From when I was a pretty young child, I was interested in learning how stuff worked,” she said.

Carnegie Mellon physicist Rachel Mandelbaum named 2019 Simons Investigator  — EurekAlert!
"I am honored to have been named a Simons Investigator. This source of support will be of great value to my research group during the next five years, which will be particularly exciting times as we explore many questions in cosmology with new datasets," Mandelbaum said.

Hyper Suprime-Cam survey maps dark matter in the universe  — Phys.org
An international group of researchers, including Carnegie Mellon University's Rachel Mandelbaum, released the deepest wide field map of the three-dimensional distribution of matter in the universe ever made and increased the precision of constraints for dark energy with the Hyper Suprime-Cam survey (HSC).

NASA’s Dark-Energy Probe Faces Cost Crisis  — Scientific American
Those include a survey to measure how the structure of the Universe evolved over time, which will shed light on the nature of dark energy. WFIRST’s data should complement the observations of several other dark-energy explorers set to come online in the early 2020s, such as the European Space Agency’s Euclid probe, says Rachel Mandelbaum, an astrophysicist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.