Rate My Professor Benjamin Rose

Dr. Benjamin Rose is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Baylor University, joining the faculty in the fall of 2023. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Notre Dame in 2018, where his dissertation examined systematic biases of Type Ia supernova distances used in observational cosmology under Prof. Peter Garnavich. He also holds an M.Sc. in Physics from Notre Dame in 2016 and a B.S. in Physics from Whitworth University in 2012. After completing his doctorate, Dr. Rose served as a postdoctoral researcher at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, working as a member of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope's supernova science investigation team led by Saul Perlmutter, collaborating with Susana Deustua, Andy Fruchter, and others. From 2020 to 2023, he was a Research Scientist at Duke University in Dan Scolnic's observational cosmology group, contributing to the Dark Energy Survey, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, Pantheon+, and several low-z supernova surveys.

Dr. Rose specializes in Type Ia supernovae, observational cosmology, absolute and relative calibration of telescopes, space telescope missions, empirical and statistical models, large computational analysis infrastructure, and open-source software. He is co-principal investigator on the NASA Roman Project Infrastructure Team grant (2023–2028, $11,000,000) to support cosmological measurements with Type Ia supernovae, co-investigator on the NASA Roman Wide-Field Preparatory Science Grant (2023–2027) for Roman Reference Fields and SNe Ia Calibration, co-investigator on an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Grant (2022–2024) titled "Are Hubble Residuals a Product of Poor Mass Estimates? Improving Supernova Ia Host Galaxy Characterizations," and administrative principal investigator on a Hubble Space Telescope GO-Grant (2022–2023, $28,000) for "Local Environment of Low-redshift Type Ia Supernova Siblings." His prominent publications include "Constraining R_V Variation Using Highly Reddened Type Ia Supernovae from the Pantheon+ Sample" (MNRAS, 516, 4822, 2022), "A Reference Survey for Supernova Cosmology with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope" (arXiv:2111.03081, 2021), "Combined, Host Galaxy Mass and Local Stellar Age Improves Type Ia Supernovae Distances" (ApJ, 909, 28, 2021), "Synergies between Vera C. Rubin Observatory, Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, and Euclid Mission: Constraining Dark Energy with Type Ia Supernovae" (arXiv:2104.01199, 2021), "Evidence for Cosmic Acceleration is Robust to Observed Correlations Between Type Ia Supernova Luminosity and Stellar Age" (ApJL, 896, L4, 2020), "Think Global, Act Local: The Effect of Environment on Hubble Residuals of Type Ia Supernovae" (ApJ, 874, 32, 2019), and contributions to the SNCosmo Python library for supernova cosmology (2023).