Fredrick Jenet

Dr. Jenet is an innovative astrophysicist, researcher, and inspiring educator whose research and activities are creating new models of education and advancing technologies for space exploration and related fields. In 2005, he created the Arecibo Remote Command Center (ARCC), an integrated research and education environment that transformed a department into a leading producer of hispanic physicists. In 2009, he co-founded the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav), a consortium of astronomers whose goal is the creation of a galactic scale gravitational wave observatory sensitive to low frequency gravitational waves. In 2011, he founded the Center for Advanced Radio Astronomy (CARA) at UT Brownsville with the mission to make South Texas a leader in space exploration through education, research, and innovation. Under CARA, he created the Low Frequency All Sky Monitor (LoFASM) in partnership with the Long Wavelength Array (LWA) and the Naval Research Lab (NRL). LoFASM, designed and built by high school, undergraduate, and graduate students, is a distributed array of radio antennas that are used to search for radio busts of extraterrestrial origin. Most recently, Dr. Jenet created STARGATE, a public-private partnership with SpaceX that will spark a culture of research, entrepreneurship, and commercialization in South Texas.