Dr. Jason W. Henning
Class of 2003
Career Pathway: Natural Resources & Agri-science
Dr. Jason W. Henning was nominated by Barbara Febey and Nancy Lemmen.
At Grayling High School Jason was especially active in band, playing clarinet in the marching and concert bands and baritone saxophone in the jazz band. He performed in pit bands for four musicals and in numerous honors bands and solo/ensemble competitions. He was a member of the stage crew for two plays, the forensics team for two years and the tennis team and astronomy club for one year each.
He graduated from the University of Chicago in 2007 with a B.A. in physics with an astrophysics specialization, and he earned an M.S. in 2010 and a Ph.D. in 2014 in astrophysical and planetary sciences from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
He was a graduate research assistant (2008-2014), a graduate teaching assistant in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences (2007-2008) at the University of Colorado at Boulder and an undergraduate research assistant at the University of Chicago (2005-2007).
He is currently a joint National Science Foundation Astronomy and Astrophysics/Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics Fellow at the University of Chicago.
Dr. Henning has been awarded several fellowships, has been a major or cited contributor in over 30 publications and has done numerous talks and poster presentations at astrophysical conferences.
His research interests include observational cosmology, large-scale structure; cosmic microwave background (CMB) data analysis, detector development and instrumentation; and CMB polarization, lensing, delensing and cosmological parameter estimation.
His present work involves a mixture of millimeter-wave detector characterization and instrument design for CMB polarization experiments as well as CMB data analysis spanning the range from low-level data cleaning and reduction to cosmological parameter estimation and forecasting.
He wrote that "these days most of my time is spent on analysis for the South Pole Telescope (SPT) collaboration, but I'm also involved in a variety of outreach activities."
"Research is still interesting and exciting," he continued. "I traveled to the South Pole for the third time this past January to help install and characterize a new camera on the South Pole Telescope. It replaced the one I worked on as a graduate student, and when we've worked out all the kinks, it should be an order of magnitude more sensitive than the previous camera, so we're very excited to see what kind of science comes out of it."
Barbara Febey remembered that, as a freshman, Jason walked into her geometry class and saw trigonometry problems on the blackboard from the previous class. He looked at the board and said, "I can hardly wait to learn that!" Nancy Lemmen recalled that he amazed his classmates and her by solving the Rubik's Cube in less than a minute.
Dr. Henning is the son of Tamara (GHS Class of 1979) and Anthony Henning; his brother Nicholas is a Class of 2005 graduate.
Visit his website at www.jasonwhenning.com.
