| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Horace W. Babcock | | | Institution: | Carnegie Institution of Washington | | | Year Elected: | 1966 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1912 | | | Death Date: | August 29, 2003 | | | | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. John N. Bahcall | | | Institution: | Institute for Advanced Study | | | Year Elected: | 2001 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1934 | | | Death Date: | August 17, 2005 | | | | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. James Gilbert Baker | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 1970 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1914 | | | Death Date: | June 29, 2005 | | | | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. Jacques Blamont | | | Institution: | University of Paris IV; Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales | | | Year Elected: | 2002 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1926 | | | Death Date: | April 13, 2020 | | | | | | |
A distinguished scholar, leader of space research and commander of the Legion of Honor, Jacques Blamont was an internationally recognized scientist and Professor at the University of Paris - VI and Conseiller du President du CNES. He pioneered planetary exploration, leading CNES in mission design and planning, including joint efforts with the USSR. He promoted a rapprochement between the U.S. and USSR in troubled times. Working with NASA, Dr. Blamont exhibited remarkable creativeness in the design of space vehicles, scientific instruments and research approaches. His work and guidance have proven of enormous benefit to the United States. A broad intellectual, he wrote an almost poetical work on the evolution of science. His publications include Vénus dévoilée, Voyage autour d'une planète (1987); Le Chiffre et le Songe, Histoire politique de la découverte (1993); Le Lion et le Moucheron, Histoire des Marrances de Toulouse (2000); and Introduction au Siècle des Menaces (2004). Jacques Blamont died April 13, 2020 in Chatillon, France at the age of 93. | |
| 5 | Name: | Dr. E. Margaret Burbidge | | | Institution: | University of California, San Diego | | | Year Elected: | 1980 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1919 | | | Death Date: | April 5, 2020 | | | | | | |
English-born American astronomer Eleanor Margaret Burbidge was the first woman to be appointed director of the Royal Greenwich Observatory. She was at the forefront in obtaining and interpreting quasar data and made notable contributions to astrospectroscopy, radio galaxies, masses and evolution of normal galaxies, and the chemical composition of stars. Dr. Burbidge served as assistant director and acting director of the Observatory of the University of London from 1948-51. In 1955 her husband, theoretical astrophysicist Geoffrey Burbidge, obtained a Carnegie fellowship for astronomical research at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California. Because women were then ineligible for such an appointment, she chose to accept a minor research post at the California Institute of Technology. In 1957 she became Shirley Farr Fellow and, later, associate professor at Yerkes Observatory at Williams Bay, Wisconsin. She also served as research astronomer and professor of astronomy at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) before taking a leave of absence to serve as director of the Royal Greenwich Observatory in 1972. Her Greenwich duties did not come with the traditional honorary title of Astronomer Royal, which instead was given to a male astronomer, in another instance of discrimination against women in the astronomical community. A longtime champion of opportunities in science for women, she refused the Annie J. Cannon Prize from the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in 1972 because, as it was an award for women only, it represented for her another facet of the same discrimination. Her action led to the formation of a standing AAS committee for the status of women in astronomy. From 1979-88 Dr. Burbidge directed UCSD's Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences, where she helped develop some of the Hubble Space Telescope's original instruments. She became a professor emeritus of the university in 1990. E. Margaret Burbidge died on April 5, 2020 in San Francisco, California at the age of 100. | |
| 6 | Name: | Dr. Jocelyn Bell Burnell | | | Institution: | University of Oxford; Royal Society of Edinburgh; Trinity College Dublin | | | Year Elected: | 2016 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1943 | | | | | | |
Jocelyn Bell Burnell is widely recognized as the individual responsible for the 1967 discovery of pulsars. With skill and perseverance she overcame the skepticism and resistance of her senior colleagues to make one of the most important and dramatic discoveries in 20th century astrophysics. In 2018 her essential role in the discovery was recognized by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation with a Special Breakthrough Prize. Bell Burnell donated the associated prize money to the Institute of Physics to support scholarships for individuals from underrepresented groups.
Later in her career she worked in infrared, X-ray and gamma-ray astrophysics. More recently she turned her attention to education including the public understanding of science where according to the Royal Society, her contribution "has been uniquely valuable." The Royal Society web site refers to Jocelyn Bell Burnell as "one of the most influential scientists in the UK." She was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2018. | |
| 7 | Name: | Dr. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar | | | Institution: | University of Chicago | | | Year Elected: | 1945 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1910 | | | Death Date: | 8/21/95 | | | | |
| 8 | Name: | Dr. Ewine van Dishoeck | | | Institution: | Leiden Observatory, Leiden University; International Astronomical Union | | | Year Elected: | 2020 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1955 | | | | | | |
Ewine van Dishoeck is professor of molecular astrophysics at Leiden University, the Netherlands. Graduated from Leiden in 1984, she held positions at Harvard, Princeton and Caltech before returning to Leiden in 1990. The work of her group innovatively combines the world of chemistry with that of physics and astronomy to study the molecular trail from star-forming clouds to planet-forming disks. She has mentored several dozens of students and postdocs and has been heavily involved in planning of new observational facilities such as the Herschel Space Observatory and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array. Her awards include the 2000 Dutch Spinoza Prize, the highest scientific honor in the Netherlands, the 2015 Albert Einstein World Award of Science, the 2018 James Craig Watson Medal of the National Academy of Sciences, and the 2018 Kavli Prize for Astrophysics. She is a Member or Foreign Associate of several academies, including that of the Netherlands, USA, Germany and Norway. Since 2007, she is the scientific director of the Netherlands Research School for Astronomy
(NOVA). From 2018-2021, van Dishoeck serves as the president of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the worldwide organization of professional astronomers. van Dishoeck has a passion for outreach to the general public and a special interest in art and astronomy. In 2019, she co-curated an exhibition on Cosmos: Art & Knowledge.
Ewine van Dishoeck was elected an international member of the American Philosophical Society in 2020. | |
| 9 | Name: | Dr. Andrea Mia Ghez | | | Institution: | University of California, Los Angeles | | | Year Elected: | 2012 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1965 | | | | | | |
Andrea M. Ghez, distinguished professor of Physics & Astronomy and head of UCLA's Galactic Center Group, is a world-leading expert in observational astrophysics. She earned her B.S. in Physics from MIT in 1987 and her Ph.D. from Caltech in 1992, and has been on the faculty at UCLA since 1994. She has used the Keck telescopes to demonstrate the existence of a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, with a mass 4 million times that of our sun. This is the best evidence yet that these exotic objects really do exist, and provides us with a wonderful opportunity to study the fundamental laws of physics in the extreme environment near a black hole, and learn what role this black hole has played in the formation and evolution of our galaxy.
Professor Ghez has actively disseminated her work to a wide variety of audiences through more than 100 refereed papers and 200 invited talks, as well features in textbooks, documentaries, and science exhibits. She has received numerous honors and awards including the Crafoord Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, election to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the Aaronson Award from the University of Arizona, the Sackler Prize from Tel Aviv University, the American Physical Society's Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award, the American Astronomical Society's Newton Lacy Pierce Prize, a Sloan Fellowship, a Packard Fellowship, the 2012 Crafoord Prize in Astronomy, and several teaching awards. Her most recent service work includes membership on the National Research Council's Board on Physics & Astronomy, the Thirty-Meter-Telescope's Science Advisory Committee, the Keck Observatory Science Steering Committee, and the Research Strategies Working Group of the UC Commission on the Future.
Andrea Ghez won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2012. | |
| 10 | Name: | Dr. Ronald D. Ekers | | | Institution: | CSIRO, Australia Telescope National Facility | | | Year Elected: | 2003 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1941 | | | | | | |
Professor Ron Ekers was appointed Foundation Director of CSIRO's Australia Telescope National Facility in 1988 and he continued in this role until March 2003, when he took up his Federation Fellowship. He graduated from the University of Adelaide in 1963 and gained his Ph.D. in astronomy at the Australian National University in 1967. His professional career has taken him to the California Institute of Technology, the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy in Cambridge, UK, the Kapteyn Laboratory in Groningen, The Netherlands, and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in New Mexico. He was director of the VLA, the major national radio telescope in the USA, from 1980 until 1987. He was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, a Foreign Member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Science and a Foreign Member of the American Philosophical Society. He is the president of the International Astronomical Union. Dr. Ekers's research interests include extragalactic astronomy, especially cosmology, galactic nuclei and radio astronomical techniques. | |
| 11 | Name: | Dr. Sandra M. Faber | | | Institution: | University of California Observatories, University of California, Santa Cruz | | | Year Elected: | 2001 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1944 | | | | | | |
Sandra Faber is University Professor Emerta at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a staff member of the UCO/Lick Observatory. She is an observational astronomer with primary research interests in cosmology and galaxy formation. Some of her major discoveries include the first structural scaling law for galaxies, large-scale flow perturbations in the expansion of the universe, black holes at the centers of galaxies, and the role of dark matter in galaxy formation.
She was one of three astronomers who diagnosed the optical flaw in the Hubble Space Telescope, and she played a major role in its repair. She established the scientific case for the Keck Telescopes, which inspired the current wave of major ground-based telescope building all over the world. Since 1994 she has been Principal Investigator of the DEIMOS spectrograph, a large optical multi-object spectrograph for the Keck 2 Telescope, which she and colleagues are using to conduct the DEEP2 survey of galaxies in the distant universe.
Dr. Faber is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She serves on the boards of several organizations including the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Annual Reviews, and the SETI Institute. She has won the National Medal of Science (2012), the Fellows Medal of the California Academy of Sciences (2016), the Gruber Cosmology Prize (2017), and the Royal Astronomical Society's Gold Medal (2020). She was awarded the American Philosophical Society's Magellanic Premium Medal in 2019. Sandra Faber was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2001. | |
| 12 | Name: | Dr. Bernard Fanaroff | | | Institution: | Square Kilometre Array South Africa; South African Radio Astronomy Observatory Project | | | Year Elected: | 2022 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1947 | | | | | | |
Bernie Fanaroff was the Director of the South African Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Radio Telescope Project from its initiation in 2003 until 2015. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London and a Founder Member of the Academy of Science of South Africa. He has been awarded the South African national Order of Mapungubwe, the Karl Jansky Lectureship of Associated Universities Inc and the NRAO, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the National Research Foundation, the Science for Society Gold Medal of the Academy of Science of South Africa and several honorary degrees. He was a Visiting Professor at Oxford University.
He has a BSc Honours degree in physics from the University of the Witwatersrand and a PhD in radio astronomy from Cambridge University. During his PhD he published the Fanaroff-Riley classification of radio galaxy and quasar morphology with fellow student Julia Riley, which continues to be a basic classification of the jets which carry energy away from the accretion disks surrounding super-massive black holes in the centres of most galaxies.
He left academia in 1976 to become a national organizer in South Africa of the nascent Metal and Allied Workers Union, one of the new non-racial unions then being organized in opposition to the legally-recognised unions which excluded Black workers, who had no rights under apartheid. He became a national secretary of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa in 1987. When Nelson Mandela became President after the first democratic election in 1994, he became Deputy Director General in the Office of the President and Head of the Office for the Reconstruction and Development Programme, government’s central programme to build the country after apartheid. He became Deputy Director General of the Secretariat for Safety and Security in 1997 and chaired the Integrated Justice System Board and the Inter-Departmental Committee for Border Control. He led the drafting of the new Firearms Control Act. He left government in 2000.
He led the bid by South Africa, with eight other African countries, to host the world’s largest telescope, the Square Kilometre Array Radio Telescope. The bid was successful in 2012. The SKA South African team also designed and built the MeerKAT radio telescope, a world-leading telescope which has made major discoveries in the evolution of galaxies and clusters of galaxies and in pulsar and transient radio source discovery and timing, as a result of its unique sensitivity, timing accuracy and imaging quality. The MeerKAT will become part of the SKA Mid-Frequency Array in the late 2020s.
SKA South Africa developed a world-leading Human Capital Development Programme, which enabled the development of a large and thriving radio astronomy science and technology community in South Africa from the initial five radio astronomers in 2003. It also trains scientists and engineers from the eight African partner countries. The SKA SA HCD programme led to the successful Development in Africa with Radio Astronomy (DARA) and the DARA Big Data programmes in partnership with the UK Government’s Newton Fund.
He was an adviser to the Director of the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory, the successor to the SKA South Africa project. He has been appointed by the Minister for Trade, Industry and Competition to lead the development and implementation of a tripartite plan for the recovery and growth of the steel and steel products industries in South Africa. He is a member of the Advisory Committee of the Breakthrough Listen project of the Breakthrough Initiatives and a Trustee of the Paleontological Scientific Trust. | |
| 13 | Name: | Dr. Wendy Freedman | | | Institution: | University of Chicago | | | Year Elected: | 2007 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1957 | | | | | | |
Wendy Freedman is the John and Marion Sullivan Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago. A native of Toronto, Canada, she received her doctorate in astronomy and astrophysics from the University of Toronto in 1984. In the same year she received a Carnegie Fellowship at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California, and joined the faculty in 1987. From 2003-2014 she served as the Crawford H. Greenewalt Director of the Carnegie Observatories, and from 2003-2015, she served as the founding chair of the Board of Directors for the Giant Magellan Telescope, a 25-m optical telescope scheduled for completion in Chile in the 2030s. Professor Freedman is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. She is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society and The Royal Society, and a Legacy Fellow of the American Astronomical Society. Professor Freedman’s awards include the Marc Aaronson Lectureship and Prize, the McGovern Award for her work on cosmology, and the American Philosophical Society's Magellanic Prize. She is one of three co-recipients of the 2009 Gruber Cosmology Prize and has also been awarded the Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics by the American Institute of Physics and American Astronomical Society. Her primary research interests are in observational cosmology. Professor Freedman was a principal investigator for a team of thirty astronomers who carried out the Hubble Key Project to measure the current expansion rate of the Universe. Presently her research interests are directed at increasing the accuracy of measurements of the expansion rate and testing whether there is new fundamental early-universe physics. She is Principal Investigator of a new first-cycle program with the James Webb Space Telescope to measure the Hubble constant to percent-level precision. | |
| 14 | Name: | Dr. Riccardo Giacconi | | | Institution: | Johns Hopkins University | | | Year Elected: | 2001 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1931 | | | Death Date: | December 9, 2018 | | | | | | |
Riccardo Giacconi received his Ph.D. at the University of Milan in 1954. He was a professor and associate director of the Harvard/Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (1973-82); director of the Space Telescope Science Institute (1981, 1993); professor at the University of Milan (1991-99); and director general of the European Southern Observatory (1993-99). A professor at the Johns Hopkins University after 1982, he also served as president of Associated Universities, Inc. from 1999 on. One of the founders of x-ray astronomy, Riccardo Giacconi was the leader of the teams that detected the first cosmic x-ray source, made the first x-ray image of the sun, and developed and operated the early UHURU x-ray satellite and the Einstein x-ray telescope. He played a major role in the early definition of the Chandra X-ray Observatory. As the first director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, as director of the European Southern Observatory, and throughout his career, he made outstanding contributions to the development of astronomy and was a forceful spokesman for international science. Dr. Giacconi was the recipient of the Helen B. Warner Award of the American Astronomical Society; the Elliott Cresson Medal of the Franklin Institute; the Catherine Wolfe Bruce Gold Medal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific; the Dannie Heineman Prize of Astrophysics from the American Astronomical Society and the American Institute of Physics; the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society; and the Wolf Prize in Physics. He received the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics and the National Medal of Science in 2005. Dr. Giacconi was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, l'Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, and the Royal Astronomical Society. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2001. Riccardo Giacconi died on December 9, 2018 in La Jolla, California at the age of 87. | |
| 15 | Name: | Dr. Owen Gingerich | | | Institution: | Harvard University & Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory | | | Year Elected: | 1975 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1930 | | | Death Date: | May 28, 2023 | | | | | | |
Owen Gingerich is a senior astronomer emeritus at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and Professor Emeritus of Astronomy and of the History of Science at Harvard University. In 1992-93 he chaired Harvard's History of Science Department. Professor Gingerich's research interests have ranged from the recomputation of an ancient Babylonian mathematical table to the interpretation of stellar spectra. In the past four decades Professor Gingerich has become a leading authority on the 17th-century German astronomer Johannes Kepler and on Nicholas Copernicus. His publications include a 600-page monograph surveying copies of Copernicus' great book De revolutionibus, for which he was awarded the Polish government's Order of Merit in 1981; later an asteroid was named in his honor. In 2006 he published God's Universe, a volume arguing that faith and science can coexist even in considerations of the nature of life. In 1984 he won the Harvard-Radcliffe Phi Beta Kappa prize for excellence in teaching. In June 2007 he was awarded the Prix Janssen by the French Astronomical Society. He has been a member of the American Philosophical Society since 1975.
In June 2017 he received Benedict Polak Prize, which he described this way: "I have just returned from Poland, where I have received the Benedict Polak Prize, which I daresay no other APS member has ever heard of. Friar Benedict the Pole was drafted in 1245 as a translator-scholar to accompany a Papal group to visit the Khan of Mongolia. The present Benedict Polak Prize was established three years ago to honor explorers in any realm of human knowledge, and is to be given each year to a Polish citizen and to a foreigner. I received this year's prize for my Copernican researches. The Polish citizen prize went to my friend Jerzy Gassowski, the archaeologist who identified Copernicus' bones in an unmarked grave under the cathedral floor in Frombork. The prizes are given in Leczyca, a small village with the founding church in Poland and the church home of Benedict the Pole. It is hard to imagine that enough citizens of Leczyca would turn up for such an occasion, but actually people came from all over Poland. The president of Poland was not present in person, but sent a citation as well as a private and specific congratulatory letter to me." | |
| 16 | Name: | Dr. Thomas Gold | | | Institution: | Cornell University | | | Year Elected: | 1972 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1920 | | | Death Date: | June 22, 2004 | | | | |
| 17 | Name: | Dr. Leo Goldberg | | | Year Elected: | 1958 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1913 | | | Death Date: | 11/1/87 | | | | |
| 18 | Name: | Dr. Jesse L. Greenstein | | | Institution: | California Institute of Technology | | | Year Elected: | 1968 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1909 | | | Death Date: | October 21, 2002 | | | | |
| 19 | Name: | Dr. James Gunn | | | Institution: | Princeton University | | | Year Elected: | 1987 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1938 | | | | | | |
James Edward Gunn is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Astronomy at Princeton University Observatory. His range of abilities, including great skill in physical theory and applied mathematics, an outstanding capability in the design of novel and powerful instruments, and extensive experience as an observational astronomer with a keen choice of central problems, is unique in astronomy. Dr. Gunn's early theoretical work helped establish the current understanding of how galaxies form and properties of the space between galaxies. He also suggested important observational tests to confirm the presence of dark matter in galaxies. Much of Dr. Gunn's later work has involved leadership in major observational projects. He developed plans for one of the first uses of digital camera technology for space observation, a project that led to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the most extensive three-dimensional mapping of the universe ever undertaken. Dr. Gunn has worked as a scientist at JPL and taught at the University of California, Berkeley, the California Institute of Technology, the University of Washington, the University of Chicago, and Rice University. He was a deputy principal investigator on the Wide Field/Planetary Camera on the Hubble Space Telescope, served as the associate director of the Apache Point Observatory and is a MacArthur Fellow. He was also a project scientist and technical director for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. His numerous honors include the Royal Astronomical Society's Gold Medal, the National Medal of Science (2009) and membership in the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Dr. Gunn earned his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1966 and has served on the faculty at Princeton since 1968. | |
| 20 | Name: | Dr. David S. Heeschen | | | Institution: | National Radio Astronomy Observatory | | | Year Elected: | 1974 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1926 | | | Death Date: | April 13, 2012 | | | | | | |
Radio astronomer David Sutphin Heeschen directed the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) from 1962-1978. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1954 and served as an instructor at Wesleyan University and as a lecturer and research associate at Harvard prior to joining NRAO as a scientist in 1956. He was director of the observatory from 1961 to 1978. Dr. Heeschen was deeply involved in the scientific aspects of studies at Green Bank, West Virginia, at the Very Large Array near Socorro, New Mexico, and at the Kitt Peak Observatory near Tucson, Arizona. A member of the American Astronomical Society (president, 1980-82), the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Dr. Heeschen also served as a consultant to NASA (1960-62, 1968-72, 1979-80) and as research professor at the University of Virginia (1980-91). He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1974. He was Senior Scientist Emeritus at NRAO at the time of his death on April 13, 2012, at the age of 86. | |
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