I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, where each year the winters seemed to grow increasingly long and frigid for my tastes. In my senior year of high school, I earned a scholarship from the Adler Planetarium (one my favorite places on Earth) and chose to put it to use attending the warm and sunny University of California: Santa Barbara. After receiving my BS in Physics in 2003, I decided to give it a go working as a developmental technician in a High Energy Physics laboratory at UCSB. There I realized I loved playing with cool laboratory "toys" so much I was compelled to apply to graduate schools and enrolled at Stanford University the following year.

At Stanford, I continued pursuing my love of cool toys by studying and working with astronomical detectors. Along the way I learned about computer programming and how to write assembly code to program microcontrollers and ASICs. I got my fix of astronomy by traveling to various telescopes to test detectors, and also through serving as president of the Stanford Astronomical Society for several years. I obtained a Masters in Applied Physics in 2006 and a PhD in Applied Physics in 2009. The title of my thesis was Hybrid CMOS SiPIN Detectors as Astronomical Imagers.

After a brief stint working as a commissioning scientist at the Atacama Large Millimeter-Submillimeter Array in Chile, I took a job as a postdoc at LLNL in 2010. My postdoc work consisted largely of working with nanosatellites: writing payload firmware and characterizing the onboard sensors (both visible and hard X-ray). I converted to a staff member in 2012, and in the years since have been delighted that I can still play with excellent toys on a daily basis. I now split my time between physics-based work, where I model gamma ray propagation through urban environments and simulate their detection in scintillators, and engineering, where I write firmware for microprocessors, program FPGAs, and work with really cool sensors. I am also consulting with NASA on the James Webb Space Telescope, where I write firmware for the detector control electronics.

Curriculum Vitae

My full CV is located here.

Personal Website

I have a personal website at www.lancesimms.com.

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