Aous Ahmad Abdo

Aous Abdo's research follows one thread across an enormous range of scales. It began inside the atomic nucleus — an analytic solution for the anharmonic vibrations of even-even spherical nuclei — and moved outward to the highest-energy light in the universe.

For his PhD at Michigan State University he built a new background-rejection technique for the Milagro water-Cherenkov observatory — the A₄ variable — that gave the instrument its first discoveries: TeV gamma-ray sources in the Cygnus region and diffuse emission from the Galactic plane. That expertise carried directly into the Fermi Large Area Telescope, where he was central to the foundational catalogs of the GeV sky — the instrument paper, the first source catalog, and the first catalogs of gamma-ray pulsars and active galaxies.