Simons Observatory Profiles: Gary Sanders, Executive Project Manager

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Gary Sanders is the Executive Project Manager, Simons Observatory at Simons Foundation. He has had a storied career managing "big" science mega-projects including the Thirty Meter Telescope and The Large Interferometer Gravity Observatory (LIGO).

He is an astrophysicist with more than 200 scientific publications including the first detection of gravitational waves and of radiation from binary black holes detected by the LIGO experiment. He began his science career in particle physics and has pursued his passion for discovery ever since.

Gary attended Columbia University, earning a bachelor's degree in physics. He then attended MIT and worked on an experiment at the German national lab DESY (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron) under Samuel Ting, who would win the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics.

After earning a PhD from MIT in high-energy physics, Sanders became an assistant professor at Princeton University and later joined the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where he served in several positions, including as principal investigator and program manager for High Energy Physics. He then became project manager and head of the GEM (Gamma, Electron, Muon) detector department for the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) Laboratory, which was designed to be the largest particle accelerator ever constructed.