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About

Stefanie Wachter is an observational astronomer and instrumentation specialist whose work sits at the intersection of large-scale sky surveys, telescope engineering, and time-domain astrophysics. She has made significant contributions to two of the most ambitious astronomical survey programs of the modern era: the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey V (SDSS-V). Her most-cited work, a foundational 2018 paper on ZTF's data processing, products, and archive, has accumulated over 1,170 citations, reflecting the survey's enormous influence on transient astronomy and its role as a cornerstone resource for the community. Within SDSS-V, Wachter has contributed across multiple technical fronts — from multi-object spectroscopic operations and wide-field corrector design to focal plane metrology, fiber optic maintenance, and cyberinfrastructure development. Most recently, she has been involved in the Local Volume Mapper Instrument, extending SDSS-V's reach into integral field spectroscopy of nearby galaxies. Taken together, her body of work demonstrates a rare combination of systems-level engineering expertise and scientific breadth, helping to build and maintain the observational infrastructure that underpins much of contemporary astrophysical research.