Dr. John Carpenter joined the ALMA Project in September 2015 as the ALMA Observatory Scientist. John received his PhD from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and was a James Clerk Maxwell Fellow at the University of Hawaii and an Postdoctoral Scholar at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). While at Caltech, John conducted research using the Owens Valley Radio Observatory (OVRO) Millimeter Array and then the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy (CARMA), and become the OVRO Executive Director.
John has a broad range of research interests designed to understand the formation and evolution of stars from their origin in molecular clouds to the development of mature planetary systems. His research has made a number of contributions to star formation studies, including estimating the lifetime of nearby molecular clouds based on a census of the embedded stellar population, constraining the mass function of brown dwarfs from sensitive near-infrared imaging and spectroscopy, measuring the mass distribution of protoplanetary disks, imaging the structure of circumstellar disks, and constraining the evolution of debris disks. With ALMA, John is obtaining high resolution images of the gas and dust in disks to probe the formation of planets.