Welcome to Jonathan Gelbord's website

In graduate school I studied observational X-ray astronomy, but I have since branched out to other wavebands, particularly optical. I am part of a collaboration (with Herman Marshall here at MIT) conducting a survey of quasar jets. We are combining Chandra X-ray data with radio and optical observations to constrain the emission processes of these jets and thereby deduce the physical conditions within these enigmatic systems. I am also continuing my doctoral thesis work (with Kim Weaver and Tahir Yaqoob), using X-ray spectra to study the structures of active galactic nuclei, testing and extending the Seyfert unified model.

My research page presents a complete listing of my work including PDF versions of papers, posters, and talks I've presented. An annotated list of the work from our jet collaboration is collected on the MIT quasar jet survey page, including some images and data files. A page for my dissertation describes each chapter and allows them to be downloaded individually or en masse.

When I'm not working there's a good chance you'll find me climbing a rock somewhere, or perhaps at one of the local pubs sampling the latest microbrews. I'd love to find the time to get back into a darkroom - I still have piles of film I've been meaning to print! Maybe one of these days I'll even scan some of them and set up an online gallery... (In my ample spare time...)

At MIT I can be found in room NE80-6091 (on the sixth floor of the Draper Labs Hill building), extension 3-3319. Of course, you can always send e-mail to jonathan [AT] space [DOT] mit [DOT] edu (please excuse the written-out address: I'm trying to elude the spam-bot e-mail sniffers...).

Please check out my wife's new business, Conscious Elegance, Ltd., for eco-friendly, socially-conscious wedding dresses. Custom gowns made by hand from cruelty-free and organic materials.

My link collection is the web page I've put the most effort into, as it's the one I use for my startup page. It looks best when viewed with a browser that supports tables and frames (e.g., Netscape 2.2 or later). Of course, if you're still using a browser that doesn't support frames, then you've got bigger problems than whether you can load my pages... Note that a few of these links are not accessable from all internet domains, but if you're connecting from an MIT and/or a JHU computer, you should have no problems...