Erika Hamden

Hamden was born in Montclair, New Jersey. Hamden studied astrophysics at Harvard College and graduated in 2006.[4] Hamden worked at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics, completing a senior thesis under Andrew Szentgyorgyi.[4] After graduating, she completed a diploma at Le Cordon Bleu in London, before working as a chef in New Jersey. She joined Columbia University for her doctoral studies in 2007, earning a PhD supervised by David Schiminovich in 2014.[5] She worked on the diffuse galactic far UV background using archival GALEX data, far UV bright galactic clouds, UV detector development, and ultraviolet instrumentation.[6][4] She held a NASA Earth and Space Science fellowship from 2011 to 2014.

Hamden joined California Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral researcher, working with Christopher Martin. Here she developed an ultraviolet telescope for a high-altitude balloon, the "Faint Intergalactic medium Redshifted Emission Balloon" (FIREBall-2).[4][7] FIREBall-2 will observe circumgalactic media (CGM) emission in the ultraviolet.[8] She appeared on the podcast 365 Days of Astronomy.[9] She was a National Science Foundation Astronomy and Astrophysics postdoctoral fellow in 2014.[10] The fellowship allowed her to develop instrumentation to study galaxies in the Keck Cosmic Web Imager redshift range.[11] In 2016 she was the first woman to be awarded a NASA Nancy Roman technology fellowship for her work in detectors.[12] She was made a Robert Andrews Millikan fellow in 2017.

Hamden joined the faculty at the University of Arizona and Steward Observatory in 2018.[13] Here she is building a UV detector lab and continuing work on FIREBall-2 and as the project scientist for the Keck Cosmic Reionization Mapper.

She is interested in silicon detector technologies and Lyman-alpha emission from the circumgalactic media.[14] She has worked on anti-reflective coatings for delta-doped CCDs, helping to improve their efficiency in the ultraviolet.[15][16][17] FIREBall-2 was designed to test this new technology.[8] The electron multiplying charge-coupled devices (EMCCDs) can suffer from clock-induced charge and spurious signals and require carefully designed shaped pixel clocks to minimize noise.[18][19] She has worked as US lead on FIREBall-2 from 2014 to its launch on September 22, 2018. Hamden was present during integration of FIREBall-2 at Fort Sumner in 2018, when a falcon landed in the telescope.[20]

Hamden is a member of the Goddard Space Flight Center Cosmic Origins Science Working Group.[21] She is one of 20 people selected as TED fellow in 2019.[22][23] Her TED Talk was selected by TED as a highlight of their April 2019 conference, and covered by Wired magazine.[24][25]