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About

Emily Farr is a key figure in the development of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey V (SDSS-V), a landmark project pioneering panoptic spectroscopy—the first all-sky, multi-epoch, optical-to-infrared spectroscopic survey. Her major contributions center on the engineering and implementation of the robotic Focal Plane System (FPS), a critical innovation that enables SDSS-V to map millions of objects across both hemispheres. This system is designed to decode the history of the Milky Way, reveal stellar interiors, investigate solar system origins, and track supermassive black hole growth. Farr’s hands-on work includes the field retermination of high-fiber count MTP connectors for the APOGEE spectrograph, addressing real-world challenges like wear analysis and throughput optimization. Her research has garnered significant attention, with her 2025 paper on SDSS-V’s panoptic spectroscopy accumulating 25 citations, and her 2020 FPS paper earning 23 citations, reflecting the high impact of her technical contributions. Farr’s blend of astronomical vision and practical engineering makes her work essential to advancing large-scale spectroscopic surveys, offering students and researchers a model of how instrumentation drives discovery in modern astrophysics.