Roeland van der Marel, PhD

As the head of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope mission office, Dr. Roeland P. van der Marel leads the institute’s Roman Space Telescope science operations, which include the mission’s planning and scheduling system, the data processing system for the Wide Field Instrument, and the data archive. He joined the institute in 1997 as a Giacconi Fellow, and has been an astronomer with tenure since 2008. He also holds a position as an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Department of Physics and Astronomy. He has extensive astronomical observing experience on space- and ground-based telescopes, with a focus on using Hubble for studies of the dynamics of galaxies and the presence of black holes at their centers. He leads the Hubble Space Telescope Proper Motion (HSTPROMO) collaboration, which aims to improve understanding of stars, clusters, and galaxies in the nearby universe through measurement of their proper motions.