SCIPP researchers Amy Furniss and Tesla Jeltema have been elected to leadership positions in the VERITAS and DESC collaborations, respectively.

Furniss, a new Associate Teaching Professor in the Physics Department, will serve as spokesperson for the Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System (VERITAS), a high-energy gamma-ray observatory with approximately 100 collaborators. VERITAS is made up of an array of four imaging Cherenkov telescopes which detect energies in the 50 GeV-50 TeV range, functioning in complement with the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space telescope.

Jeltema, who is SCIPP Associate Director and Professor of Physics, will serve as deputy spokesperson for the Dark Energy Science Collaboration (DESC) using the Vera C. Rubin Observatory to measure dark energy in the universe. The DESC Collaboration has over 1100 members in 20+ countries, whose goals are to make high accuracy measurements of fundamental astrological parameters using data from the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST).