Status and Future of The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope

Abstract:

I will summarize the current status and future plans for the world’s largest sub millimeter telescope, the JCMT.  The JCMT provides a powerful suite of instruments for wide-field mapping, heterodyne spectroscopy, and very long baseline interferometry.  These have been used extensively and with high impact including the discovery and characterization of sub millimeter galaxies, studies of star-formation and galaxy evolution, and the first images of the black holes in M87 and Sgr A* with the Event Horizon Telescope.  New observing programs in the areas of VLBI, time domain science, and intensity mapping will play key roles in the future of the JCMT and new instrumentation will lead to order of magnitude improvements in capability.
Speaker: 
Dr. Geoffrey Bower
Place: 
KIAA Shuqi meeting room
Time: 
Monday, December 15, 2025 - 3:30PM to Monday, December 15, 2025 - 4:30PM
Biography: 
Dr. Geoffrey Bower serves as EAO President and Director of the JCMT. Dr. Bower has most recently served as Project Scientist for the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration and Chief Scientist for Hawaii Operations with Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Hilo, HI. He is also Affiliate Graduate Faculty with UH Manoa Physics and Astronomy. A graduate of Princeton University and UC Berkeley, he has also held research and teaching positions at UC Berkeley, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, and the Max Planck Institute for Radioastronomy. His interests are in black holes, neutron stars, the dynamic radio sky, radio cosmology, and radio astronomy instrumentation. Dr. Bower is the author of more than 230 publications. These publications include the first detections of intrinsic structure and polarized emission in the Galactic Center black hole, the first image of a black hole, and the first detection of an extragalactic counterpart to a fast radio burst. Dr. Bower has been awarded the Breakthrough Prize for Fundamental Physics, the Einstein Medal, and numerous other awards.