D

Biographies of Committee Members and Staff

THOMAS (TOM) GREENE, Co-Chair, is an astrophysicist at NASA’s Ames Research Center, where he conducts observational studies of young stars and exoplanets. He also served as director of the Ames Center for Exoplanet Studies, the SOFIA project scientist, and chief of the Astrophysics Branch at NASA Ames. Before joining NASA, he was a staff scientist at the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center, on the faculty of the University of Hawaii, and on the staff of the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility. Dr. Greene is a co-investigator (co-I) on and is conducting observations with two instruments for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, the Near-Infrared Camera and the Mid-Infrared Instrument. Dr. Greene received a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Arizona.

CHRISTOPHER F. MCKEE, Co-Chair, is an emeritus professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. McKee’s research focuses on the theory of the interstellar medium and star formation. He helped develop the three-phase model of the interstellar medium, which has been widely used to organize and interpret observational data. Dr. McKee is currently carrying out numerical simulations of star formation. While at the University of California, Berkeley, he led the Theoretical Astrophysics Center and served as its first director. Dr. McKee subsequently directed the Space Sciences Laboratory and served as the chair of the Department of Physics, the interim dean of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, and the interim vice chancellor for research. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). He received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley.

WILLIAM NIELSEN BRANDT is the Verne M. Willaman Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics and a professor of physics at The Pennsylvania State University. His research interests include active galaxies, cosmological X-ray surveys, starburst galaxies, normal galaxies, and X-ray binaries. Prior to joining Penn State, Dr. Brandt was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He is a fellow of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), the American Physical Society (APS), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Dr. Brandt is the recipient of the 2016 Bruno Rossi Prize of the American Astronomical Society High Energy Astrophysics Division. He received a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Cambridge.

DANIELA CALZETTI is a professor and the head of the Department of Astronomy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research interests include understanding star formation on the scales of galaxies, using the information provided by a variety of both space-borne (Hubble, Spitzer, Herschel, etc.) and ground-based telescopes at wavelengths that range from the ultraviolet to the radio. Prior to joining the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Dr. Calzetti held various positions at the Space Telescope Science Institute, including European Space Agency (ESA) as a fellow, postdoctoral researcher, assistant astronomer, and associate astronomer. She is a member of the NAS, the AAS, and the International Astronomical Union (IAU). In addition, Dr. Calzetti was a member of the NASA Science and Technology Definition Team for the LUVOIR Surveyor Mission Concept Study, and the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy Space Telescope Science Institute Council. She is a member of the EUCLID Science Consortium/Co-I of Euclid Science Program: Precision Studies of Galaxy Growth and Cosmology. She received a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Rome.

IAN P. DELL’ANTONIO is a professor of physics at Brown University and the associate director of Ladd Observatory. Prior to Brown, Dr. Dell’Antonio served as a postdoc at Bell Laboratories and the National Optical Astronomy Observatories. His research focuses on the study of mass structures in galaxy clusters using weak gravitational lensing and on deep imaging surveys for clusters. Dr. Dell’Antonio is the principal investigator (PI) of the Local Volume Complete Cluster Survey at the National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory survey program, and a full member of the Vera Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time Dark Energy Science Collaboration. He received a Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard University.

PETER GARNAVICH is the chair of the Physics Department and a professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame. His research includes the study of binary stars, the progenitors of supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, and cosmology. Dr. Garnavich has been awarded the Gruber Prize in Cosmology and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for his contributions to the discovery of the accelerating universe. He received a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Washington.

ANTHONY H. GONZÁLEZ is a professor and the associate chair in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Florida. Dr. González’s research focuses on observational cosmology and galaxy evolution, with an emphasis on constraints derived from galaxy clusters. He is a member of the Euclid Consortium and one of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Early Release Science teams. Prior to moving to the University of Florida, Dr. González was a Center for Astrophysics Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He is a legacy fellow of the AAS and received a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

GABRIELA GONZÁLEZ is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Louisiana State University (LSU). She is a former spokesperson of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration that first detected gravitational waves. Prior to joining LSU, Dr. González was an assistant professor at The Pennsylvania State University. She has received numerous honors and awards including the NAS Award for Scientific Discovery, the Bruno Rossi Prize from the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the AAS, and the APS Edward A. Bouchet Award. Dr. González is a member of the NAS. She received a Ph.D. in physics from Syracuse University.

ALYSSA A. GOODMAN is the Robert Wheeler Willson Professor of Applied Astronomy at Harvard University, as well as a research associate of the Smithsonian Institution. Her research focuses primarily on new ways to visualize and analyze the tremendous data volumes created by large and/or diverse astronomical surveys, and on improving understanding of the structure of the Milky Way Galaxy. Dr. Goodman is the former co-director for Science at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She was awarded the Newton Lacy Pierce Prize from the AAS; was named a fellow of the AAAS; and was chosen as Scientist of the Year by the Harvard Foundation. Dr. Goodman has served as chair of the Astronomy Section of the AAAS and currently serves on both the IAU and the AAS Working Groups on astroinformatics and astrostatistics. She received a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University.

SHAUL HANANY is a professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His research focus is on building instruments with which to observe the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation and study the early history of the universe. Dr. Hanany led or co-led several ground-breaking balloon-borne instruments including MAXIMA, MAXIPOL, Archeops, and EBEX. He was the PI of PICO, a mission concept for a probe-scale CMB space mission. Dr. Hanany is a fellow of the APS and is the Morse-Alumni Distinguished University Teaching Professor—the University of Minnesota’s highest distinction for undergraduate education.

ELIZABETH HAYS is a research astrophysicist and the chief of the Astroparticle Physics Laboratory at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). Dr. Hays serves as the project scientist for the Fermi

Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Her research focuses on high-energy studies of astrophysical sites of particle acceleration and the development of instrumentation for space-based gamma-ray observatories. Dr. Hays has received the Robert H. Goddard Exceptional Scientific Achievement Award and is a fellow of the APS. She received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Maryland, College Park.

GARTH D. ILLINGWORTH is a distinguished professor emeritus in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is recognized for work on the most-distant galaxies with Hubble, science policy leadership and for a role in formulating JWST. Dr. Illingworth has been one of the world’s most highly cited researchers three times. He was the Space Telescope Science Institute deputy director in the 1980s and was one of the originators of the Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST) concept that ultimately became JWST. Dr. Illingworth was also the organizer/co-organizer of a crucial NGST workshop (1989) and technical study (1991), and the deputy-PI of the Hubble Space Telescope Advanced Camera. His experience includes chairing the Science Steering Committee for Keck (1990s) and the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) Science Advisory committee (2010-2012). Dr. Illingworth has had extensive science policy leadership as the chair of the 1990 National Academies’ astronomy and astrophysics decadal survey panel on UV-Optical from Space, the Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee for its formative years during which several key task forces were formed, and the JWST Science Advisory Committee from 2009 to 2017. He received a Ph.D. in astronomy and astrophysics from the Australian National University.

MUSTAPHA ISHAK-BOUSHAKI is a professor of physics and astrophysics at The University of Texas at Dallas (UT-Dallas). His research is in cosmology with a particular focus on testing gravity at cosmological scales, cosmic acceleration and intrinsic alignment of galaxies in weak gravitational lensing studies. In 2005, he published a seminal article on whether cosmic acceleration is due to some dark energy of a modification to Einstein’s General Relativity at Cosmological Scales, which opened a whole area of research. He is a leading member of the Dark Energy Science Collaboration of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument collaboration. Dr. Ishak-Boushaki is a fellow of the AAAS and recipient of the Robert S. Hyer Research Award of the Texas Section of the APS and the UT-Dallas President Teaching Award. He received a Ph.D. in physics from the Queens University at Kingston, Canada.

EAMONN J. KERINS is a senior lecturer at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Manchester. Research interests include the search for exoplanets with gravitational microlensing and transit techniques, time-domain galactic surveys, the study of exoplanet atmospheres through transmission spectroscopy, and the development of game-theory approaches in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He is the deputy lead of the ESA Euclid Exoplanet Science Work Group that is developing an exoplanet microlensing survey as an additional science program for Euclid; and the PI for SPEARNET, which is developing innovative tools to allow a heterogeneous global network of optical and near-infrared telescopes to be used collectively for the study of exoplanet atmospheres. Dr. Kerins previously served on the board for Large Synoptic Survey Telescope:U.K. Consortium and on the selection committee for the Kepler K2 Microlensing Science Team. He received a Ph.D. in astronomy from Queen Mary, University of London.

CHRISTOPHER S. KOCHANEK is an Ohio Eminent Scholar and a professor of astronomy at The Ohio State University. His research interests focus on the time domain universe with topics ranging from supernovae and black hole formation to the variability of accreting supermassive black holes and variable stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. Dr. Kochanek is a recipient of the AAS’s Beatrice M. Tinsley Prize and the joint AAS and APS Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics. He received Ph.D. in physics from the California Institute of Technology.

QUINN M. KONOPACKY is an associate professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. Her interests focus on observational studies of star and planet formation and evolution; with a particular focus on using adaptive optics (AO) technology on large, ground-based telescopes and an emphasis on AO-fed spectroscopy of directly imaged exoplanets. She is the co-PI of the Gemini Planet Imager 2.0 upgrade project, the co-chair of the W.M. Keck Adaptive Optics Working Group, and a member of the TMT Scientific Advisory Committee. Dr. Konopacky is the project scientist for the High-resolution Infrared Spectrograph for Exoplanet Characterization (HISPEC, Keck Observatory) and the Multi-Objective Diffraction-Limited High-resolution Infrared Spectrograph (MODHIS, TMT). She received a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of California, Los Angeles.

JEFF R. KUHN is a professor and astronomer at the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Hawaii. Dr. Kuhn’s research interests include telescopes and optical and infrared instrumentation, solar magnetism, atmosphere and helioseismology, physics of polarized light, and circumstellar radiation. Prior to joining the University of Hawaii, he was an astronomer at the National Solar Observatory, a professor of physics and astronomy at Michigan State University, and an instructor of physics at Princeton University. Dr. Kuhn is the recipient of numerous awards and honors including the Senior Humboldt Prize for Scientific Achievements, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, the Shenstone Prize, and the Hornbeck Prize. He is a board member of the Breakthrough Foundation Watch and Starshot, and the Scientific Advising Committee for Solar and Terrestrial Research at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Dr. Kuhn is a member of the IAU, the AAS, and the APS. He received a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University.

SCOTT M. RANSOM is a tenured astronomer with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia, and a research professor with the Department of Astronomy at the University of Virginia. He works on a wide variety of projects involving finding, timing, and exploiting pulsars of various types, using data from many different instruments and at energies from radio waves to gamma-rays. Dr. Ransom’s main focus is on searching for exotic pulsar systems, such as millisecond pulsars and binaries, and then using them as tools to probe a variety of basic physics, including tests of general relativity, the emission (and hopefully soon the direct detection) of gravitational waves (as part of the NANOGrav collaboration, of which he is the current chair), and the physics of matter at supra-nuclear densities. Dr. Ransom is a recipient of the AAS’s Helen B. Warner Prize. He received a Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard University.

KATE SCHOLBERG is the Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Physics and a Bass Fellow at Duke University. Dr. Scholberg’s research interests include experimental elementary particle physics, nuclear physics, astrophysics, and cosmology. Prior to joining Duke University, she was an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a research associate at Boston University. Dr. Scholberg is the recipient of an NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program Award and a Department of Energy Outstanding Junior Investigator Award, a member of the NAS, and is a fellow of the APS. She received a Ph.D. in physics from the California Institute of Technology.

JOSEPH SILK is a professor at the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, the Homewood Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, and a senior fellow at the Beecroft Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at the University of Oxford. His research interests include cosmology and particle astrophysics, especially cosmic microwave background, formation of the galaxies, and exploration of the nature of dark matter. Prior to joining Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Silk was a postdoctoral fellow at Cambridge University and Princeton University, and taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Oxford. He is a fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the NAS. Dr. Silk is the recipient of the 2011 International Balzan Foundation Prize. He received a Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard University.

ALYCIA J. WEINBERGER is a staff scientist with the Earth and Planets Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution for Science. Dr. Weinberger’s research interests include observational astrophysics, planet formation and circumstellar disks, young stars, and high angular resolution imaging. Prior to joining the Carnegie Institution for Science, she was a Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer postdoctoral research astronomer and astrobiology postdoctoral fellow with the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Weinberger is a member of the U.S. Extremely Large Telescope Program Advisory Committee, the SOFIA Science Council of Universities Space Research Association, the Magellan Telescopes Science Advisory Committee, the NASA Nexus for Exoplanet System Science Team, and the NASA Large Binocular Telescope Interferometer Key Science Team. She is also a member of the Division of Planetary Science under the AAS. Dr. Weinberger is the recipient of numerous awards and honors including the Vainu Bappu Gold Medal of Astronomical Society of India, the University of California, Los Angeles, Chancellor’s Award for Postdoctoral Research, and the Annie Jump Cannon Award, and she is a fellow of the American Astronomical Society. She received a Ph.D. in physics from the California Institute of Technology.

STAFF

GREGORY MACK, Study Director, joined the Board on Physics and Astronomy in 2019 and is a senior program officer. Along with managing the Committee on Astronomy and Astrophysics and the Committee on Radio Frequencies, he was the study co-director for the Astro2020 decadal survey and is also the study co-director for the Biological and Physical Sciences Research in Space Decadal Survey. Prior to the National Academies, Dr. Mack was a government relations professional at the APS, a program director in the Division of Astronomical Sciences at the NSF, an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow placed in the Division of Physics at the NSF, and a visiting assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Ohio Wesleyan University. Dr. Mack received his Ph.D. in physics from The Ohio State University in 2008 with a focus on theoretical astrophysics. His research concerned theoretical particle astrophysics and cosmology, specifically the particle properties of dark matter.

DIONNA WISE is a program coordinator with the Space Studies Board (SSB), having previously worked for the National Academies’ Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education for 5 years. Recently, she was the lead study coordinator for the Astro2020 decadal survey. Ms. Wise has a long career in office administration, having worked as a supervisor in several capacities and fields. She attended the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, and majored in psychology.

COLLEEN N. HARTMAN joined the National Academies in 2018 as the director for both the SSB and the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board. After beginning her government career as a presidential management intern under Ronald Reagan, Dr. Hartman worked on Capitol Hill for House Science and Technology Committee Chairman Don Fuqua, as a senior engineer building spacecraft at the NASA GSFC, and as a senior policy analyst at the White House. She has served as Planetary Division director, deputy associate administrator, and acting associate administrator at NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, as deputy assistant administrator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and as deputy center director and director of science and exploration at NASA GSFC. Dr. Hartman has built and launched scientific balloon payloads, overseen the development of hardware for a variety of Earth-observing spacecraft, and served as NASA program manager for dozens of missions, the most successful of which was the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE). Data from the COBE spacecraft gained two NASA-sponsored scientists the Nobel Prize in physics in 2006. She also played a pivotal role in developing innovative approaches to powering space probes destined for the solar system’s farthest reaches. While at NASA Headquarters, she spearheaded the selection process for the New Horizons probe to Pluto. She helped gain administration and congressional approval for an entirely new class of funded missions that are competitively selected, called “New Frontiers,” to explore the planets, asteroids, and

comets in the solar system. She has several master’s degrees and a Ph.D. in physics. Dr. Hartman has received numerous awards, including two prestigious Presidential Rank Awards.