It is my pleasure to officially announce the composition of the Rubin LSST Target of Opportunity (ToO) Advisory Board. The Rubin ToO Advisory Board is charged with giving advice on various aspects of the ToO process during Rubin Operations. The Board will work directly with the Rubin ToO Observer (RTO), advise on trigger decisions in real time, review ToO observations and give feedback to the RTO and the Observatory about the process, and on the longer term, in coordination with the Rubin Survey Cadence Optimization Committee (SCOC), the Board may recommend changes to the ToO trigger criteria and follow-up strategy.
The Board has been active since November 2025. It provided advice to Rubin Observatory on the recent LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) gravitational wave event S251112cm.
The members of the committee were selected from over 40 nominations from the Rubin scientific community to ensure that the composition of the committee covers all relevant expertise, see the call for nominations for details.
The Rubin Science Advisory Committee (SAC) was responsible for reviewing the nominations and recommending the membership of the committee to the Rubin Director. The SAC received only a few international applications from outside the operation partners (Chile, UK, France). Appointments to the board are for two years, renewable. We expect roughly ½ of the community to rotate out on a 2-year cycle. With this in mind, the SAC encourages nominations in future years from the full international Rubin science community.
The 11 members of the inaugural committee are:
Igor Andreoni, University of North Carolina
Michael Coughlin, U. Minnesota
Emille Ishida, CNRS, France
Tim Lister, Las Cumbres Observatory
Raffaella Margutti, Berkeley
Samantha Oates, Lancaster University
Antonella Palmese, Carnegie Mellon
Osmar Rodríguez, Universidad Católica de Chile
Robert Stein, University of Maryland
Christopher Stubbs, Harvard
Quanzhi Ye, University of Maryland
I want to congratulate the new members on their selection, and thank the Science Advisory Committee for running an effective and timely process. Special thanks to Federica Bianco for her support and counsel on the Rubin ToO program generally and in helping the SAC to set up the Advisory Board.
The board membership information and charge are here.