Dr. Leonard is awarded an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship to carry out a program of research and education at the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Leonard will pursue an integrated two-pronged research effort into the study of supernovae-the final, explosive stage in the evolution of certain types of stars. First, he will seek to verify and extend the role of distant supernovae as cosmological probes through the spectroscopic and photometric study of supernovae discovered by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy and QUEST-2 surveys. Second, he will launch an intensive supernova spectropolarimetry campaign at the Palomar 5-meter and Keck 10-meter telescopes to investigate the early-time geometry of supernovae, which is of fundamental importance to their utility as distance indicators.
In addition to his research, Dr. Leonard will teach a course targeted to Caltech undergraduates entitled ''Inventing Reality: The Human Search for Truth''. While broadly related to the history of human scientific thought, a particular focus of the course will be the issue of how the questions that people have asked and how the answers that satisfy the questioners have changed over time and across cultures. This will provide Caltech undergraduates a unique opportunity to examine the foundations of the present scientific paradigm and to gain an appreciation for how other societies at different times and/or places approach(ed) the same questions that Western scientists are asking today.
