Instructors
David Jones
David Jones is an Assistant Astronomer/Professor at the UH Institute for Astronomy, based in Hilo, beginning in 2024. Before coming to UH, he was an Assistant Astronomer at Gemini Observatory and an Einstein Fellow at UC Santa Cruz. David works on observations of exploding stars, called supernovae, which he uses to map the expanding Universe. In his free time, he enjoys hiking, birdwatching, and surfing.
Michael Liu
Michael is an Astronomer/Professor and the Director of the TeachAstro program. He grew up in the Washington, DC suburbs and studied at Cornell University and UC Berkeley before coming to the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in 2000. He conducts direct studies of gas-giant exoplanets and brown dwarfs to discover such objects, characterize their properties, and probe their formation. He has been awarded the Beatrice Watson Parrent Fellowship, a NASA Hubble Fellowship, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and the UH Regents’ Medal for Excellence in Research. In addition to astronomy, he enjoys spending time with his family, cooking, eating, and playing basketball.
Michael Nassir
Michael A. Nassir is an Instructor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where he teaches undergraduate lecture and laboratory courses for both majors and non-majors. He is also the faculty advisor for most Physics & Astro majors, serves on departmental and college-level curriculum committees, and works with various STEM education programs on undergraduate pedagogy, oral & written communication, and public outreach. Mike received his B.S. in Physics from Caltech and his M.S. in Astronomy from the University of Hawaiʻi, where his research has focused on infrared observations of star-forming regions and spectroscopy of the solar corona.
Jennifer van Saders
Jen is most interested in stellar structure and evolution, but also spends some time thinking about exoplanets and their relationships to their host stars. Her work mainly involves running theoretical stellar evolutionary models, although she’s been known to use a telescope from time to time. She was born in New Jersey, did her undergraduate work at Rutgers, her PhD at the Ohio State University, a postdoc at Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, CA, and has been faculty at the IfA since 2017.
Jonathan Williams
Jonathan has been a faculty member at the IfA for 20 years. He teaches graduate classes on the Interstellar Medium and star and planet formation and uses telescopes on Maunakea, Chile, and in space to study protoplanetary disks around young, nearby stars. Born and raised in England, he did his undergraduate work at Cambridge, a PhD at Berkeley, postdocs at Harvard and Arizona and was briefly a faculty member at Florida before coming to Hawaii.