Bios
Dr. Jonathan P. Gardner
Spitzer Space Telescope Program Scientist
NASA Headquarters
Dr. Jonathan Gardner is on temporary assignment as the Spitzer Space Telescope program scientist at NASA Headquarters. Gardner is also the deputy senior project scientist for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. He began studying astronomy at Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., while spending his summers as a laboratory assistant at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. After graduating from Harvard, he moved to Honolulu to earn a masters degree and doctorate from the University of Hawaii. During his 6 years in Hawaii, he spent more than 100 nights on the frigid summit of Mauna Kea Observatory, studying cosmology and the evolution of galaxies using infrared detectors that were being tested for use on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. In 1992, Dr. Gardner won a NATO fellowship to pursue his research at the University of Durham in England. In 1996, he returned to Goddard just before astronauts installed the infrared detectors on Hubble. In addition to conducting research with Hubble, Gardner also helps with the plans for its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2011. The new telescope is designed to study galaxy formation and evolution in infrared, reaching backwards in time to detect and identify the first light from stars and galaxies in the early history of the universe.
Dr. George Rieke
Principal Investigator, Multiband Imaging Photometer,
Spitzer Space Telescope
Dr. George Rieke is the principal investigator of the multiband imaging photometer, which provides imaging and spectroscopic data at far-infrared wavelengths for NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. He is a regents professor in the department of astronomy at the University of Arizona, Tucson, and the deputy director of Steward Observatory in Tucson. Rieke has worked extensively in the development of innovative far-infrared detector arrays and instrumentation, and their astronomical applications. He helped develop the first infrared-optimized telescope and is the lead scientist on a mid-infrared instrument for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2011. He is the author of the book, "Detection of Light: From the Ultraviolet to the Submillimeter."
Dr. Scott J. Kenyon
Senior Astrophysicist
Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
Dr. Scott J. Kenyon is a senior astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Cambridge, Mass. Kenyon studies the formation of planetary systems, the evolution of interacting binary systems, the formation of low mass stars like our Sun, and the structure of circumstellar discs in young and old stars. His body of research has established symbiotic stars as a unique class of interacting binary star systems and provided some of the best indicators for proto-planetary discs in stars with ages of a few million years. Kenyon's recent efforts concentrate on planet formation in discs surrounding newly-formed stars. He and his colleagues also developed a sophisticated code to construct numerical models of planet formation. Kenyon received a bachelor's degree in physics from Arizona State University, Tempe, and his masters and doctorate in astronomy from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received the Copernicus Medal from the Nicolaus Copernicus University (1987) and shared the Hoopes Prize of Harvard University with Jane Luu and Sarah Stewart (1995).
