Eric E Bloemhof

Eric Bloemhof received the Ph.D. degree in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in the Quantum Electronics and Astrophysics group of Prof. C. Townes. He was a Center Postdoctoral Fellow with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA, and continued work at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in the area of submilli meter instrumentation, including superconducting tunnel-junction mixers and receivers. He was Chief Physicist for the Palomar Observatory, California Institute of Technology, where he was involved primarily on the PALAO adaptive optics system being built at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for the 5-m Hale telescope. In 2001, he joined JPL to work on various instrumentation connected with space-borne interferometers, including the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) and the interferometric Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF- I). He currently leads the collector optics group for SIM, and the mask development effort for JPL's innovative four-quadrant- phase-mask coronagraph that has demonstrated deep starlight suppression on the Hale telescope. Recent research has concentrated on the behavior of speckles in highly corrected imagers and coronagraphs and inventing techniques for suppressing speckle noise and enhancing companion-detection contrast with an eye toward planet searches. Dr. Bloemhof is a member of the American Physical Society, the American Astronomical Society, and URSI.