Gordon J. Stacey

Overview

Stacey received his PhD from Cornell University in 1985 under the mentorship of Martin Harwit. He held a post-doctoral position at UC Berkeley under the mentorship of Charles Townes and Reinhard Genzel before returning to join the Cornell faculty in 1991.  His research specialty is star and galaxy formation over cosmic time, often enabled by instrumentation that his group has built. We are looking for new PhD and MS students for each of the major programs below, in particular that of upgrading ZEUS-2 to ZEUS-3D.

Research Focus

Stacey’s research interests center on studies of star formation and its interplay with the interstellar medium across cosmic time with a focus on far-infrared and submillimeter wavelength spectroscopy.  These lines provide important, and often dominant coolants for the interstellar medium, and therefore trace the properties of the sources of heat, be it stellar radiation fields, interstellar shocks or radiation from active galactic nuclei.  To pursue this science, Stacey’s group has built several generations of far-IR and submillimeter wave spectrometers that were deployed on a variety of leading airborne and ground-based facilities.  Supporting and related studies include work with facilities including the Spitzer and Herschel Space Observatories, the SOFIA airborne telescope, the IRAM 30 m telescope, the PdBI/NOEMA and ALMA arrays and JWST.

Stacey is CCAT Observatory Director. The CCAT Observatory is an international collaboration of research institutions, led by Cornell that have come together with common science goals that are enabled by a telescope optimized for wide-field mapping speed in the submillimeter to millimeter wave spectral bands.  Our telescope, the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope (FYST) is a 6-m aperture wide-field submillimeter telescope at a 5600 m elevation site near the summit of Cerro Chajnantor in northern Chile.  Expected first light with FYST in the 4th quarter of 2026.

Stacey's group is building the "Epoch-of-Reionization Spectrometer"(EoR-Spec), a spectroscopic instrument module for Prime-Cam on FYST.  Each EoR-Spec module surveys a 1.3 degree field of view with an array that contains ~ 6000 kinetic inductance detectors.  With a spectral resolving power of R∼100, and a frequency coverage of 210 to 420 GHz EoR-Spec is optimized for line intensity mapping of the red-shifted [CII] 158 μm fine structure line at redshifts between 8 and 3.5, corresponding to the epoch from the end of reionization – when galaxies were forming - to the beginning of Cosmic Noon, when the star formation rate per comoving volume reached its historic peak. EoR-Spec is scheduled for first light on FYST in 2027. 

Stacey is the Principal Investigator on the Planetary Origins and Evolution Multispectral Monochromator (POEMM), a NASA Astrophysics Pioneers Mission focused on protoplanetary disk science.  POEMM utilizes Virtually Imaged Phased Array (VIPA) technology that we developed in collaboration with NASA GSFC (Zou et al. 2025) for direct detection spectroscopy at very high resolving powers at far-infrared wavelengths. POEMM’s VIPA spectrometers will velocity resolve spectral lines to tomographically reveal the radial distribution of molecular hydrogen, water vapor and neutral oxygen in protoplanetary disks.  POEMM will measure the “snow line”, the radius within which only rocky planets are thought to form, and outside of which gas giants are formed and yield clues to origins of the water in terrestrial planets, like the Earth.  POEMM is scheduled for a long duration balloon flight in late 2029, launched from Williams Field on the ice sheet near McMurdo Station in Antarctica. 

Stacey’s group is teaming with that of former group PhD student, Professor Carl Ferkinhoff at Winona State University in the conversion of our long slit submillimeter grating spectrometer, ZEUS-2 into an imaging spectrometer, ZEUS-3D.  Like ZEUS-2, ZEUS-3D will be used on the APEX telescope on the Chajnantor Plateau to study star formation in galaxies at redshifts between 1 and 5 by detecting their far-IR fine structure line emission. But ZEUS-3D is an imager, so that it will be uniquely powerful for detecting the circum-galactic medium around these galaxies to better understand the process of galaxies accreting gas from the cosmic web to fuel their growth.