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About

Andrew Malonis is an observational astronomer whose research centers on infrared time-domain astronomy, gravitational-wave follow-up, and astronomical instrumentation. He is best known as a principal contributor to the Wide-Field Infrared Transient Explorer (WINTER), a pioneering near-infrared survey instrument mounted on a dedicated 1-meter robotic telescope at Palomar Observatory. His foundational 2020 paper introducing WINTER has accumulated 39 citations, establishing the instrument's scientific vision and motivating subsequent development efforts. Malonis has contributed across every phase of the project, from articulating design requirements and developing the innovative InGaAs detector architecture — which employs commercially produced sensors cooled thermoelectrically — to overseeing commissioning and characterizing early on-sky performance after WINTER's 2023 installation. A central ambition of this work is enabling rapid robotic follow-up of kilonovae produced by binary neutron star mergers, a goal brought to life in his 2025 observations of the gravitational-wave candidate S250206dm, representing some of the first near-infrared electromagnetic counterpart searches of their kind with WINTER. Through this body of work, Malonis has helped establish near-infrared time-domain astronomy as a vital frontier in multimessenger astrophysics.