Welcome to the McCarthy group webpage!

Current and former group members (and friends) at the ISMS 2018 conference

The McCarthy group is located in the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Our work overlaps astronomy with chemistry. We use spectroscopy to investigate how molecules interact with light and with each other, and to determine their structure. Our research is related to the atomic and chemical composition, evolution, and fate of molecular gas clouds between stars, where solar systems form. The work performed in our lab has enabled precise characterization of many molecular species and yielded about 25 % of the molecular detections in the interstellar medium.