image: Daniel Jaffe
Credit: Giant Magellan Telescope – GMTO Corporation
PASADENA, CA – January 13, 2026 – The GMTO Corporation, the international consortium building the Giant Magellan Telescope, today announced it has appointed Daniel T. Jaffe as president, succeeding Robert N. Shelton, who announced his retirement last year after guiding the observatory through a period of significant growth.
“Dan brings decades of leadership in research, astronomy instrumentation, public-private partnerships, and academia,” said Taft Armandroff, board chair of the GMTO Corporation. “His deep understanding of the Giant Magellan Telescope, combined with his experience leading large research enterprises and cultivating a collaborative environment, make him exceptionally well suited to lead the observatory through its next phase of construction and toward operations.”
Jaffe served as vice president for research at The University of Texas at Austin from 2016 to 2025. During his tenure, research expenditures increased by 89% and the university landed important new research centers funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and Department of Energy (DOE). He led the university’s academic enterprise through the COVID-19 pandemic while serving as interim provost from 2020 to 2021. He is the Jane and Roland Blumberg Centennial Professor in the Department of Astronomy and was department chair from 2011 to 2015.
Jaffe’s experience includes serving on the board of directors of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) and the Gemini Observatory. He also played a lead role in establishing The University of Texas at Austin’s partnership in the Giant Magellan Telescope while serving on its Science Advisory Council. His honors include Harvard University’s Bart J. Bok Prize, a Humboldt Fellowship, and a David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship.
“I am honored to lead the Giant Magellan Telescope at this exciting stage,” Jaffe said. “Robert Shelton leaves behind a strong foundation, and I look forward to working with our consortium partners and the U.S. government to advance construction. For me, as for the U.S. astronomical community and our international partners, the Giant Magellan Telescope represents a profound leap in our ability to explore the Universe and employ a host of new technologies to make fundamental discoveries.”
Jaffe is widely recognized for developing advanced astronomical instrumentation that enhances telescope performance. His research group pioneered the manufacture and use of micromachined silicon diffractive immersion gratings for high-resolution spectroscopy, a technology that has reshaped modern instrument design. His devices are used on both ground-based telescopes, including those at the McDonald Observatory, as well as space-based observatories such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) James Webb Space Telescope. Jaffe’s IGRINS spectrograph has served the astronomical community at multiple leading observatories. His latest instrument, the Giant Magellan Telescope Near-Infrared Spectrograph (GMTNIRS), will revolutionize the study of planetary system formation, small stars, and other near-infrared objects.
Jaffe joins the GMTO Corporation at a pivotal time, as the Giant Magellan Telescope continues to gain momentum as one of the most ambitious research projects in astronomy. In June 2025, the NSF advanced the observatory into its Final Design Phase, one of the final steps before becoming eligible for federal construction funding. The recent addition of Northwestern University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to its international consortium also underscores the observatory’s status as a top research priority for the world’s leading institutions. These partnerships further strengthen the observatory’s scientific and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities in exoplanets, cosmology, and time-domain astronomy, while also reinforcing its strategic ties with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile.
With this leadership transition, the board of directors of the GMTO Corporation reaffirms its commitment to completing the NSF’s Final Design Phase and its next funding round to continue advancing the Giant Magellan Telescope beyond its current 40% under-construction status.