| | 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. 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. | |
| 5 | 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 | | | | |
| 6 | 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. | |
| 7 | 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. | |
| 8 | 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. | |
| 9 | 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. | |
| 10 | 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." | |
| 11 | 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 | | | | |
| 12 | 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 | | | | |
| 13 | 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 | | | | |
| 14 | 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. | |
| 15 | 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. | |
| 16 | Name: | Dr. Kenneth I. Kellermann | | | Institution: | National Radio Astronomy Observatory | | | Year Elected: | 1997 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1937 | | | | | | |
Dr. Kenneth I. Kellermann is a Senior Scientist at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory where he works on the study of radio galaxies, quasars and cosmology, on the development of new instrumentation for radio astronomy, and the history of radio astronomy. He also holds an appointment as a Research Professor at the University of Virginia and as an Outside Scientific member of the German Max Planck Society. Dr. Kellermann received his S.B. degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1959 and his Ph. D. in physics and astronomy from Caltech in 1963. Following his Ph. D. he spent two years at the CSIRO Radiophysics Laboratory in Australia. Since 1965 he has been at NRAO except for extended leaves at Caltech as a Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Visitor, and in the Netherlands, Australia, and Germany. He has served as the Assistant Director at NRAO and as Director at the Max Planck Institute fur Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany. Dr. Kellermann is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, a Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He is a recipient of the Warner Prize of the American Astronomical Society, the Gould Prize of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Rumford Medal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He is a member of the International Astronomical Union, where he served as president of the Commission on Radio Astronomy, the American Astronomical Society, the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, and the Astronomical Society of Australia. He has served on the Council of the National Academy of Sciences and on the Board of Trustees of the North East Radio Astronomy Corporation. | |
| 17 | Name: | Dr. Robert P. Kirshner | | | Institution: | Thirty Meter Telescope International Observatory; Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2005 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1949 | | | | | | |
Robert Kirshner is best known for his observational studies of supernovae, which helped provide the scientific grounding for the teams investigating these extraordinarily distant lighthouses, and this in turn led to the surprising conclusion that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, probably the most significant cosmological discovery of the past decade. His previous work included important research on the large scale distribution of galaxies. A lively and entertaining lecturer, he teaches Harvard University's largest core course in the mathematical sciences. When applying for graduate school at Harvard, he was denied admission on the grounds that he was interested in too many things to be serious about astronomy; he later became Chair of the Harvard Astronomy Department, and he is president of the American Astronomical Society. Dr. Kirshner presently holds the titles of Clowes Professor of Science at Harvard University and Master of Quincy House at Harvard College. He received his Ph.D. in 1976 from the California Institute of Technology and was elected to the membership of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1992 and the National Academy of Sciences in 1998. In 2012 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He received the James Craig Watson Medal of the National Academy of Sciences in 2014 and the Wolf Prize in 2015. | |
| 18 | Name: | Dr. Judith L. Lean | | | Institution: | Naval Research Laboratory | | | Year Elected: | 2013 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1953 | | | | | | |
Judith Lean is Senior Scientist for Sun-Earth System Research in the Space Science Division of the Naval Research Laboratory where she studies the integrated extended environment of the Earth, from its surface to the Sun. A U.S. citizen since 1992, she earned a Ph.D. in atmospheric physics from the University of Adelaide, Australia (1982) and a Bachelor of Science (Hons) from the Australian National University (1975). She has worked at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC since 1986, following an initial appointment as a research assistant at the University of Colorado at Boulder (from 1981 to 1986). Her research focuses on the mechanisms and measurements of variation in the Sun's radiative output at all wavelengths, and the effects of this variability on Earth, including space weather, climate change and the ozone layer. She has testified to the U.S. Congress on the role of solar output variations in climate change, and chaired the National Research Council’s (NRC) Working Group on Solar Influences on Global Change. She has served on a number of NSF, NOAA, NRC and NASA advisory committees, including the NRC Decadal Survey on Earth Science and Applications, the NRC Decadal Survey on Solar and Space Science and NASA’s Science Advisory Committee. A member of the AGU, IAGA, AAS/SPD, APS and AMS, she was elected a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 2002 and a member of the US National Academy of Sciences in 2003. She is the author (or co-author) of 150 published papers in the scientific literature, and has made more than 290 presentations at scientific meetings, seminars, colloquia and lectures. Judith Lean was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2013. | |
| 19 | Name: | Dr. John C. Mather | | | Institution: | NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; University of Maryland | | | Year Elected: | 2023 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1946 | | | | |
| 20 | Name: | Dr. Nicholas U. Mayall | | | Institution: | Kitts Peak Nationall Observatory | | | Year Elected: | 1962 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1906 | | | Death Date: | 1/5/93 | | | | |
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