Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

Nolan Grieves is an astronomer at the forefront of exoplanet detection, specializing in the development of high-precision instrumentation to find low-mass, Earth-like worlds. His key research areas include radial velocity (RV) spectrograph design, Doppler calibration techniques, and the characterization of close-in super-Earths. Grieves’s major contribution is the development and on-sky validation of the TOU spectrograph, a robotic, compact, very high-resolution optical instrument (R=100,000) deployed at Fairborn Observatory’s 2-meter Automatic Spectroscopy Telescope. His work demonstrated that compact, cost-effective spectrographs can achieve the ~0.1 m/s precision needed to detect low-mass planets, a critical step toward finding Earth analogs. Notably, Grieves pioneered the use of a patented monolithic Michelson interferometer as a filtered calibration source, solving key challenges in achieving sub-meter-per-second Doppler accuracy. His pilot survey of 12 bright FGK dwarfs with TOU delivered promising on-sky performance, proving the instrument’s capability for detecting small planets. With foundational papers on spectrograph design and calibration accumulating citations, Grieves’s innovative instrumentation work is enabling the next generation of exoplanet surveys, pushing the boundary of what is possible in the search for habitable worlds.