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About

Dr. Sarah Tuttle is a leading astronomical instrumentation scientist whose work is central to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey V (SDSS-V), one of the most ambitious all-sky spectroscopic surveys ever undertaken. Her primary research area is the design and deployment of robotic systems for massive multi-object spectroscopy, enabling the simultaneous observation of millions of celestial objects. Dr. Tuttle’s major contribution is the development of the robotic Focal Plane System (FPS) for SDSS-V, a transformative technology that uses hundreds of independently moving fiber positioner robots to precisely capture light from stars, galaxies, and quasars across the sky. Her most-cited paper, "A robotic Focal Plane System (FPS) for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey V" (2020, 23 citations), details this groundbreaking system, while subsequent works on coordinate transforms and fiber connector retermination (2022) demonstrate her meticulous engineering leadership. By creating the automated "brain" and "nervous system" of SDSS-V, Dr. Tuttle’s work directly enables the survey’s core science goals: decoding the history of the Milky Way, revealing stellar interiors, investigating planetary system origins, and tracking the growth of supermassive black holes across cosmic time. Her achievements represent a critical bridge between cutting-edge robotics and transformative astrophysics.