Matt O'Dowd (astrophysicist)
Matthew John O'Dowd is an Australian astrophysicist. He is an associate professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department at the Lehman College of the City University of New York and writer and host of PBS Space Time on YouTube. He is a frequent guest on Science Goes to the Movies on CUNY TV and on StarTalk radio with Neil deGrasse Tyson.Career
O'Dowd studies black holes and quasars by using gravitational lensing. He uses the Hubble Space Telescope to look at distant quasars that line up with nearby galaxies. Those galaxies act like additional lenses on the telescope, allowing scientists to see much closer to the black hole than is otherwise possible.
O'Dowd is an associate professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department at the City University of New York. He is a staff scientist at the American Museum of Natural History. Since 2015, he has been the writer and host of PBS Space Time, a video series by PBS Digital Studios. O'Dowd is a crew member of Black Rock Observatory, a mobile observatory that debuted at Burning Man in 2012.
