Research Spotlight: Prof. Keivan Stassun
Keivan Stassun is a professor of astronomy at Vanderbilt and uses ACCRE to process data for the Kilodegree Extremely Large Telescope (KELT), a multi-university collaboration to look for planets outside of our solar system. KELT made news recently because of the discovery of KELT-9b, the hottest planet ever found. Professor Stassun uses ACCRE for its parallel processing capabilities and availability of support staff. He sees the value of ACCRE for the university as a whole: “In my mind, ACCRE is absolutely vital to Vanderbilt as a research university. I don’t see how we would be able to even call ourselves a major research university or be viable or competitive without a facility like ACCRE.”