Michael Bolte is a Distinguished Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California Santa Cruz.
Keck Observatory, and leads the University of California participation in the Thirty-Meter Telescope Project.
General research area is the nature of the oldest stars in the Galaxy and the early chemical evolution of the Universe.
[1] With Kathryn Johnston (Columbia) and Lars Hernquist (Harvard) published one of the early papers on identifying "fossil" structures in the Galactic halo left by tidally shredded dwarf galaxies: "Fossil Signatures of Ancient Accretion Events in the Halo"[2] With Don Vandenberg (University of Victoria) and Peter Stetson (Herzberg Institute for Astrophysics) he published a new technique for measuring age differences between globular clusters that was insensitive to the cluster distances, reddening and overall metallicity.
[3] With David Lai (UC San Diego), Jennifer Johnson (Ohio State University), Sara Lucatello (Osservatorio Astronomico di Padova), Alex Hager (U Minnesota) and Sten Woosley (UC Santa Cruz) published a study of the detailed abundances of extremely metal-poor stars using the results along with theoretical yields from zero-metallicity stars to constrain models for Pop III objects.