Tony Mroczkowski, currently an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) who will join ICE-CSIC in 2025 as a tenured scientist, obtained funding thanks to the ATRAE programme granted by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities in Spain through the State Research Agency (AEI).
As an ESO astronomer and submillimeter instrument scientist at ESO, Tony Mroczkowski has worked on the development of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) since 2016, incarnating a leading role in the design of the 50-meter Atacama Large Aperture Submm Telescope (AtLAST). At ICE-CSIC, Mroczkowski will continue being part of the core AtLAST leadership, overseeing the large international team that will ensure that AtLAST's first generation instrumentation can meet its key science requirements. AtLAST is a concept for a next generation widefield telescope with mapping speed over one hundred thousand times that of ALMA and operating at similar wavelengths.
Meanwhile, after joining the ICE-CSIC in September 2025, Mroczkowski and his team at ICE-CSIC will work to develop optics, filters, and filter banks applicable to AtLAST and other telescopes operating in submillimeter cosmology. The team will also use the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect to study galaxy clusters for observational cosmology and astrophysics.
"Most of the light in the Universe is in the microwave and far infrared (mm and submm wavelengths), yet it's one of the least explored parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. AtLAST will change that, allowing us to truly explore our cosmic origins, and I look forward to ICE-CSIC helping make this fantastic project happen", says Mroczkowski.
Tony Mroczkowski obtained his PhD in Astronomy in 2009 from Columbia University working on instrumentation for, and analysis of the data from, the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Array (SZA). He was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (USA), working on the projects BLAST-pol and MUSTANG. Later, he became an Einstein Fellow at JPL/Caltech working on instrumentation for the original 25-meter CCAT project and a National Research Council fellow at the Naval Research Lab in DC. He has been an astronomer at ESO since early 2016, and was tenured in 2021.
The Spanish Research Agency, part of the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, published in December 2024 the resolution for the call of the ATRAE Programme. This programme grants 30 million euros to recruit 31 world-leading scientists in their fields. Thanks to ATRAE, it will be possible to hire one postdoctoral researcher to participate in the project. The programme also provides funding for electromagnetic simulation software and some prototyping in laboratories.
