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About

David Sprayberry is a leading experimental cosmologist and instrumentation scientist whose work has been central to the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) project. His primary research areas include the development of robotic fiber positioning systems, large-scale spectroscopic survey instrumentation, and the mitigation of observational biases in cosmological clustering measurements. Sprayberry’s most significant contribution is his leadership in designing and implementing DESI’s revolutionary robotic multi-object focal plane system, which employs 5,020 fiber positioners capable of retargeting with micron-level precision every 10–20 minutes—a feat documented in his highly cited 2022 paper (175 citations). He also co-authored the definitive overview of DESI’s fiber system (2024, 57 citations), which enables simultaneous spectroscopy of 5,000 objects to measure 40 million galaxies and quasars. More recently, Sprayberry has tackled a critical systematic challenge in large-scale structure analyses: correcting for fiber assignment selection biases. His 2025 paper (25 citations) and its companion (2024, 10 citations) provide robust methods for producing alternate realizations of fiber assignments, ensuring unbiased clustering measurements in both data and simulations. Through these innovations, Sprayberry has enabled DESI’s transformative measurements of cosmic distances and dark energy, cementing his role as a key architect of modern precision cosmology.