Stacy McGaugh is American astronomer and professor whose deeply complex work looks into the likes of dark matter, how galaxies form and evolve, how cosmological parameters are measured, low surface brightness galaxies, and Modern Newtonian dynamics. He currently works as a professor in the Department of Astronomy at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.

Born in January 1964, McGaugh is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, and the University of Michigan. He has also worked at such hallowed institutions as the University of Maryland, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and even Cambridge University in England (the second-best university in the world). He has worked at Case Western Reserve since 2012.

McGaugh’s work is not for the layman; he does not post easy-explainer videos on YouTube; nor does he appear on panel shows. He reserves his Twitter account for sharing his views on everyday subjects such as politics and Midwest weather. Yet for those students of astronomy, his work, particularly low surface brightness galaxies — he was the first person to use the term “baryonic Tully-Fisher relation” and one of the first to realise that low surface brightness galaxies are dominated by dark matter — is both fascinating and important.