UCSC Professor to Head UC Observatories/Lick Observatory

The University of California (UC) has appointed Michael Bolte, PhD, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), as director of the UC Observatories/Lick Observatory, effective July 1. Bolte has served as interim director of UC Observatories, a multicampus research unit with headquarters at UCSC, since Joseph S. Miller retired last year to return to full-time teaching and research. UCO/Lick operates the Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton and the UCO Technical Labs at UCSC and is a managing partner of the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. Lick Observatory, established in 1888, was the first major mountaintop observatory. Bolte was a Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow at UCSC before joining the faculty in 1993. Much of his research involves observations of the oldest stars and star clusters in the Milky Way galaxy to better understand the first epoch of star formation. Bolte was co-principal investigator on the Echellete Spectrograph and Imager on the 10-meter Keck II Telescope, and he led the development of a new prime-focus camera for the 3-meter Shane Telescope at Lick. The UCO/Lick director serves on the board of directors of the California Association for Research in Astronomy, the governing board of Keck. Bolte has been active in the planning and design of the giant ground-based Thirty-Meter Telescope (TMT), a collaborative effort involving UC, the California Institute of Technology, the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy and the Association of Canadian Universities for Research in Astronomy. Bolte currently serves on the TMT board.