Matthew Povich, a Cal Poly Pomona astronomy faculty member, is getting $650,000 from the National Science Foundations Early Career Development (CAREER) grant, given to full time professors working towards tenure. This is one of six grants awarded nationally in the astronomy field, and the only one to be awarded to a primarily undergraduate university.

The NSF grant spans five years, and will sponsor a postdoctoral fellow to assist in research, teach and assist in other grant activities. These additions are comforting to CPPs Physics and Astronomy Department, due to the grants financial stability and support.

The grants aims are to build a strong foundation of astronomy research activity at CPP, leverage an international community of over one million citizen scientists to power discoveries and build enthusiasm for astronomy, and establish Bring the Universe Into LA Districts.

Povichs proposal includes building a new calibration and spatially resolved map of the present-day Galactic star formation rate.

I like to say that star formation is the lifeblood of a galaxy, and the star formation rate is a galaxy's pulse, said Povich in an email correspondence.

My CAREER project is focused on improving measurements of the star formation rate in our Milky Way Galaxy, so in a sense we're trying to take the pulse of the Milky Way.

With the incorporation of citizen science, Povichs groundbreaking Milky Way Project aims to help scientists and researchers deal with the flood of data that confronts them. Tens of thousands of volunteers have classified well over 50,000 images from the project website, http://www.milkywayproject.org.

In the past what we did was have small teams of professional astronomers looking at very small blotches of the sky, said Povich. What we want to do now is use the Milky Way Project to look at the whole galaxy sort of unrestricted, which is much harder because the galaxy is very big.

To date, the Milky Way Project has been used to catalog several thousand star-forming nebulae throughout a large fraction of the Milky Way Galaxy. Part of the CAREER grant goal is to do the rest of the Galaxy. However, before beginning CAREER grant research, Povich intends to first use the Milky Way Project to search for bow shocks in our galaxy.

Im trying to get [new] data prepared, said Povich.

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CPP astronomy professor wins NSF research grant worth $650,000