Associate Professor David Goldberg
Phone:(215) 895-2715

Fax:(215) 895-5934

Email:goldberg@drexel.edu

Office:Disque 810

Postal Address: Dept. of Physics, Drexel University


3141 Chestnut Street


Philadelphia, PA 19104

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This page is somewhat boring. I like to think that I am not. In the past, I have made festive and exciting webpages but those days may be behind me. Or maybe not.

Quick Bio:

I joined the Astrophysics Group in the Physics department at Drexel in the fall of 2001. I was extremely involved in the construction of the new Joseph R. Lynch Observatory. I am also very involved in teaching and curricular issues. I have served in the past on the College of Arts & Sciences undergraduate curriculum committee, and the Physics department curriculum committee, which I now chair. In Fall, 2002, we instituted major changes in the curriculum, including the introduction of the Contemporary Physics sequence. I am also director of undergraduate studies, so if you have any questions about your degree, please be sure to ask. Finaly, I am a member of the faculty senate, so if you're a faculty member with a concern, let's see what we can do.

I am also very involved in research. Most of my work centers around cosmology in some way or another. I am interested in gravitational lensing, and, in particular, in extracting additional information out of weak lensing signals, and have started looking at the question of combining weak and strong fields. In 2001, Michael Vogeley and I (ably assisted by undergrads Greg McIvor, Greg Byrne, and Ernie Mamikonyan) put together the "Frinkiac" a 48 node, 96 processor (1.4 GHz/chip) Beowulf cluster. It has been used for N-body simulations as well as MHD calculations of the coronal mass ejections, and is the centerpiece for BASIN (Beowulf Analysis Symbolic INterface), a computational projected funded by the NSF for 5 years of development. Check here for progress, downloads, and documentation.

Previously, I worked as a "Gibbs Lecturer" (my fancy postdoc title) at Yale University with Priya Natarajan, and in the process, developing a cool little java program, the Yale Observatory iMAge Manipulation Application (YOMAMA) . Prior to that, I did my graduate work at Princeton University under David Spergel. I did my thesis on "Running the Universe Backwards in Time," in which I developed a Least Action method for running large N-body simulations self-consistently in reverse. I also came dangerously close to winning the departmental Table Tennis Tournament twice. Completing our trip back in time, I did my undergraduate work at Boston University, majoring in Astronomy and Physics, with minors in Math and Religion. My senior thesis work was with Tereasa Brainerd, running numerical simulations of clusters.

Teaching:

Physics 101 Fundamentals of Physics ISpring, 2007, Spring 2008
Physics 111 Physics ISpring, 2004, Spring 2005
Physics 113 Contemporary Physics IFall 2002, Fall 2003, Fall 2004, Fall 2005, Fall 2006, Fall 2007
Physics 131 Survey of the UniverseFall 2001, Spring 2002, Fall 2002, Fall 2004, Spring 2005
Physics 231 Introductory Astrophysics Winter 2003, Winter 2005, Winter 2007
Physics 431/731 Galactic Dynamics Winter 2002, Fall 2003
Physics 432/750-001 Cosmology Winter 2006, Winter 2008
Physics 511 E&M I Winter 2007, Winter 2008
tDEC 113Physical Foundations of Engineering IIWinter 2004
tDEC 201Energy ISpring 2006
Honors 200-18Playing Dice with the Universe Fall 2005

Publications:

  • Beowulf Analysis Symbolic INterface (BASIN): Interactive Parallel Data Analysis for Everyone, E Vesperini, DM Goldberg, S McMillan, J Dura, & D Jones, submitted to CISE, arxiv/0804.4639
  • Reconstruction of Cluster Masses using Particle Based Lensing I: Application to Weak Lensing, S Deb, DM Goldberg, & VJ Ramdass, submitted to ApJ, arxiv/0802.0004
  • Weak lensing ellipticities in a strong lensing regime, R Massey & DM Goldberg, 2008, Astrophys. J., Lett, Vol. 673, pp. 111-114, arxiv/0709.1479
  • Gravitational Shear, Flexion, and Strong Lensing in Abell 1689, A Leonard, DM Goldberg, J Haaga & R Massey, 2007, Astrophys. J., 666, 51 astro-ph/0702242
  • Large-Scale Distortions in Map Projections, DM Goldberg & J. Richard Gott III, 2007, Cartographica Vol. 42, Num. 4, astro-ph/0608501
  • Measuring Flexion, DM Goldberg & A Leonard, 2006, Astrophys. J., 660, 1003, astro-ph/0607602
  • Weak Gravitational Flexion, DJ Bacon, DM Goldberg, BTP Rowe, and AN Taylor, 2005, MNRAS, in press, astro-ph/0504478
  • The Mass Function of Void Galaxies in the SDSS Data Release 2, DM Goldberg et al., 2005, Astrophys. J. 521, 643, astro-ph/0406527
  • Galaxy-Galaxy Flexion: Weak Lensing to Second Order, DM Goldberg & DJ Bacon, 2005, Astrophys. J. 619, 741, astro-ph/0406376
  • Simulating Voids, DM Goldberg & MS Vogeley, 2004, Astrophys. J., 605, 1, astro-ph/0307191
  • The Galaxy Octopole Moment as a Probe of Weak Lensing Shear Fields, DM Goldberg & P Natarajan, 2002, Astrophys. J., 564, 65., astro-ph/0107187
  • Using Perturbative Least Action to Reconstruct Redshift Space Distortions, DM Goldberg, 2001, Astrophys. J., 552, 413, astro-ph/0008266
  • Using Perturbative Least Action to Reconstruct the Local Group, DM Goldberg, 2001, Astrophys. J., 550,87, astro-ph/0009046
  • Using Perturbative Least Action to Recover Cosmological Initial Conditions, DM Goldberg & DN Spergel, 2000, Astrophys. J., 544, 21, astro-ph/9912408
  • A Comparison of Simple Mass Estimators for Galaxy Clusters, TG Brainerd, CO Wright, DM Goldberg & JV Villumsen, 1999, Astrophys. J. 54, 9, astro-ph/9903069
  • The Microwave Background Bispectrum, Paper I: Basic Formalism, DN Spergel & DM Goldberg, 1999, Phys. Rev. D, 59, 103001, astro-ph/9811252
  • High Resolution Simulations of Cluster Formation, TG Brainerd, DM Goldberg & JV Villumsen, 1998, Astrophys. J. 502, 505, astro-ph/9706165
  • The Microwave Background Bispectrum, Paper II: A Probe of the Low Redshift Universe, DM Goldberg & DN Spergel, 1999, Phys. Rev. D., 59, 103002, astro-ph/9811251
  • Astrometric Shifts in the OGLE-1 Microlensing Events, DM Goldberg & P Wozniak, 1998, Acta Astronomica, 48, 19, astro-ph/9712262
  • Using Astrometry to Deblend Microlensing Events, DM Goldberg, 1998, Astrophys. J. 498, 156, astro-ph/9708172
  • Determination of the Baryon Density from Large-Scale Galaxy Redshift Surveys, DM Goldberg & MA Strauss, 1998, Astrophys. J. 495, 29, astro-ph/9707209
This page was written by and is maintained by goldberg@drexel.edu