Bruce Macintosh will begin his role as director of the University of California’s UC Observatories on Sept. 1, 2022. (Photo courtesy of University of California Office of the President via Bay City News)

A former physics professor at Stanford University has been appointed to direct the University of California Observatories, UC President Michael Drake said in a statement.

Bruce Macintosh, who holds a doctoral degree in astronomy, will begin a five-year term on Sept. 1 serving nine UC campuses. He will oversee UC facilities such as the Lick Observatory, technical labs at UC Santa Cruz and UCLA and the university’s partnership with the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

Macintosh will be a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. Macintosh was a professor at Stanford University for the past nine years. Since 2018, he also served as deputy director of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford.

Keith Burbank is currently a fulltime reporter covering Alameda County and Oakland news for Bay City News. He has also worked on the Data Points project for Local News Matters, finding trends and stories about the region through data. In 2019, he was a California Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism, producing a series about homeless deaths in Santa Clara County. He worked as a swing shift editor for the newswire for several years as well. Outside of journalism, Keith enjoys computer programming, math, economics and music.