While a student at NAU, Dr. Gregory Mace participated in two Space Grant Internships. He worked closely with Dr. Lisa Prato at Lowell Observatory to study young, low-mass stars. This work combined almost 20 years of astronomical observations and resulted in two published papers that reveal the gravitational interactions in two- and three-star systems.

Dr. Mace earned his Ph.D. from UC Los Angeles in 2014. As a member of the UCLA Infrared Laboratory he assembled, modified, and tested MOSFIRE (the Multi-Object Spectrometer for Infra-Red Exploration).

This state-of-the-art Cassegrain instrument on the Keck I telescope allows astronomers to observe up to 46 objects simultaneously. These observations produce spectra, which reveal information about stellar composition, star formation, and distant galaxies. Working with the WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) Brown Dwarf Team at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC), Dr. Mace has observationally confirmed over 100 of the coolest brown dwarfs in the solar neighborhood. Also, as a graduate student he founded the award winning UCLA astronomy outreach group, Astronomy Live!. This student led group organizes school visits and the annual UCLA science day 'Exploring Your Universe'. For his work founding this group Gregory was awarded the Rudnick-Abelmann Scholarship by the UCLA Department of Physics and Astronomy.

In July 2014 Dr. Mace joined Dr. Daniel Jaffe's instrumentation lab at UT Austin. As the IGRINS (Immersion Grating Infrared Spectrograph) Postdoc Fellow, Dr. Mace is in charge of maintaining the IGRINS spectrograph and assisting observers at McDonald Observatory. Dr. Mace is employing IGRINS in his studies of the substellar boundary and low-mass stars.