Faculty Directory
| Department Chair: Jonathan Fortney | Department Manager: Alyssa Danielli |
| Vice Chair: Brant Robertson | Graduate Advisor: Brandon Day |
| Graduate Program Director: Andrew Skemer | Department Assistant: Kali Lucas |
| Undergraduate Program Director: Connie Rockosi | Astronomy Program Coordinator: Lani Skelton |
- Title
- Professor/Astronomer
- Division Physical & Biological Sciences Division
- Department
- Astronomy & Astrophysics Department
- UC Observatories
- Phone 831-459-2987
- Website
- Office Location
- Interdisciplinary Sciences Building, 281
- 281 Interdisciplinary Sci Bldg
- Mail Stop UCO / Lick Observatory
- Faculty Areas of Expertise Astronomy, Astrophysics
Research Interests
Jean Brodie's research interests include globular star clusters and galaxy formation. Globular clusters each contain hundreds of thousands of stars tightly bound together by gravity. About 150 globular clusters orbit around our Milky Way galaxy, although some galaxies host tens of thousands of these objects. They are among the oldest radiant objects in the universe and are associated with galaxies of all morphological types. As such, they provide important clues about the early environments out of which galaxies formed and they serve as bright fossils that trace the mergers and acquisitions that have built up galaxies over cosmic time.
Brodie is the founder of the SAGES international collaboration (Study of the Astrophysics of Globular clusters in Extragalactic Systems http://sages.ucolick.org). Many SAGES members are her current and former post-docs and graduate students.
She is PI of the SLUGGS survey (Sages Legacy Unifiying Globular clusters and GalaxieS - honoring the UCSC mascot, the banana slug) that is exploring the formation histories of nearby galaxies using imaging and spectroscopy of the galaxies' starlight, as well as their globular cluster systems. Observations are made primarily with the Keck and Subaru telescopes and the data are coupled with theoretical models of galaxy formation in a cosmological context. See http://sluggs.ucolick.org for details.
Biography, Education and Training
PhD 1981 University of Cambridge, Institute of Astronomy and Emmanuel College
1980-1982 Harkness Post-doctoral Fellow, UC Berkeley
1982-1984 Chambers Research Fellow, Girton College Cambridge; SERC Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge
1984-1987 Assistant Research Astronomer, UC Berkeley
1987- 1991 Assistant Professor/Astronomer UCSC
1991-1996 Associate Professor/Astronomer UCSC
1997- Professor/Astronomer UCSC
