Dave Cook Named New NED Project Scientist

IPAC is pleased to announce the appointment of David O. Cook as Project Scientist for the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED), effective September 4, 2026. Cook steps into an updated leadership role left by Joe Mazzarella, who retired in September after serving in various NED leadership roles for more than 20 years.

Cook brings an extensive background in extragalactic astrophysics, large-scale survey management, multi-messenger astronomy, and scientific data curation to this key role. He earned his Ph.D. in astrophysics/physics from the University of Wyoming and studied physics, astrophysics, and chemistry as an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Caltech, Cook joined NED as a Staff Scientist in 2018.

“NED has played an integral role in my professional career, starting in graduate school when I discovered how much time its curated objects and services saved me,” Cook said. “Years later, I joined the team and helped the project expand to support new research areas, such as time-domain astronomy. NED has been a great resource for me, and I am proud to have contributed to its impact on the scientific community.”

IPAC Executive Director Tom Greene said Cook is already well-established in providing scientific leadership to the data archive, having developed the successful and highly-used Gravitational Wave Follow-up (GWF) Service and NED Local Volume Sample (NED-LVS), as well as initiatives to optimize the archive’s data ingestion process. 

“Dave is an excellent communicator and has an established record of participation in IPAC-wide activities, including co-organizing the Greater IPAC Science Symposium for several years in a row, and now chairing our next strategic conference on advancing astrophysics with survey data,” said Greene. “He has big shoes to fill in the wake of Joe Mazzarella's retirement, and I am confident he will bring energy and vision to the role.”

Cook joins NED Principal Investigator and former IPAC Director George Helou and NED Task Lead Xiuqin Wu to define and execute the strategic vision for one of IPAC’s and NASA’s keystone astrophysics data archives. “NED, like other science archives, is faced with the opportunities and challenges of accelerating data collection and fast evolving AI technology,” said Helou. “Dave steps up as NED Project Scientist at a crucial moment to help boost the extent and quality of NED’s accounting of the universe and offer new services to enable more scientific discoveries.”

“It has been a pleasure working with Dave over the past seven years, and I am very excited to continue working with him in his new role as Project Scientist,” said Wu. “I look forward to relying on his scientific insight to help guide our priorities and ensure that our efforts best serve the community, as well as on his proven technical expertise to work closely with our developers to turn these prioritized plans into practical, effective solutions.” 

“This is an exciting time for NED,” Cook said. “In the coming years, data from major missions and surveys will provide astronomers with unprecedented resolution and sky coverage, deepening our understanding of the universe. A core mission for NED is to combine the basic properties of these datasets into a unified, cohesive picture of unique cosmic objects. I look forward to helping guide NED into an exciting future and empowering our team to take on this challenge.”

About NED

Founded by former IPAC Director George Helou and researcher Barry Madore, NED debuted in 1990 as a public database of cross-matched extragalactic objects taken from published papers and sky surveys, with the goal of capturing the most reliable census of galaxies in the universe. The science data include names, positions, fluxes, diameters, redshifts, and redshift-independent distances. The data archive grew from holding tens of thousands of objects, to what is now over one billion objects and growing. Its users often refer to NED as “Google for Galaxies.” Learn more about NED at https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu.