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About

Tracy Naugle is an astronomical instrumentation specialist whose work has significantly advanced wide-field survey capabilities, most notably through contributions to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-V). Her primary research focuses on optical system design, corrector optics, and the practical challenges of deploying large-scale survey instruments. Naugle’s major contribution is the development and on-sky validation of SDSS-V’s new three-element wide field corrector, which replaced the previous two-element design. This upgrade was critical because the older system featured an aspherical focal surface that was not optimized for infrared observations. By engineering a corrector that improves performance across a broader wavelength range—including the infrared—Naugle has directly enhanced SDSS-V’s ability to map millions of stars and galaxies with higher fidelity. Her work, detailed in the 2022 paper “On-sky performance of the SDSS-V wide field corrector” (3 citations), represents a tangible leap in survey efficiency and data quality. Though early in citation impact, this achievement underscores her role in pushing the boundaries of ground-based astronomical instrumentation, enabling next-generation surveys to probe the universe with unprecedented precision.