Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

Naveen Pai is a leading astronomical instrumentation scientist whose work has shaped major spectroscopic surveys on some of the world’s most powerful telescopes. His primary research areas are Galactic archaeology and galaxy evolution, with a focus on designing and building cutting-edge multi-object spectrographs and fibre-positioning systems. Pai was instrumental in the development of the HERMES spectrograph for the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT), a facility-class instrument designed for the GALAH survey—the first major effort to unravel the Milky Way’s formation history through stellar chemistry. His work on HERMES, including its first-light results (93 citations), has been foundational. He also led the engineering design of the TAIPAN instrument’s Starbug fibre-positioning robots, which serve as a prototype for the MANIFEST system on the Giant Magellan Telescope. More recently, Pai has been central to Hector, a new multi-object integral field spectrograph that began a 15,000-galaxy survey in 2023. With over 170 combined citations across his most influential papers, Pai’s contributions are enabling transformative, large-scale surveys that are rewriting our understanding of galaxy formation and evolution.