Starmus

Charlie Duke

Participated as Orion lunar module pilot on the Apollo 16 mission in 1972 and explored Descartes. The Apollo 16 mission is considered one of the most successful, due to the number of experiments performed on lunar terrain, and the amount of rocky material brought to Earth. Apollo 16 (April 16–27, 1972) was launched from John F. Kennedy […]

Elizabeth Blackburn

Dr. Blackburn is a leader in the area of telomere and telomerase research. She discovered the molecular nature of telomeres-the ends of eukaryotic chromosomes that serve as protective caps essential for preserving the genetic information – and discovered the enzyme telomerase, which replenishes telomeres. Blackburn is currently a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and […]

Brian Schmidt

Brian Schmidt is the Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University (ANU). He was previously a Distinguished Professor, Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and astrophysicist at the University’s Mount Stromlo Observatory and Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics. He is known for his research in using supernovae as cosmological probes. He currently holds an Australia Research […]

James Hansen

James R. Hansen is a professor of history at Auburn University in Alabama. His book From the Ground Up won the History Book Award of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1988. For his work, The Wind and Beyond (NASA) – (six-volume series), he was awarded the Eugene Ferguson Prize for Outstanding Reference Work by […]

Kurt Wüthrich

Kurt Wüthrich, Swiss scientist who, with John B. Fenn and Tanaka Koichi, won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2002 for developing techniques to identify and analyze proteins and other large biological molecules. After receiving a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Basel in 1964, Wüthrich took his postdoctoral training in Switzerland and […]

Armen Sarkissian

Armen Sarkissian is an Armenian physicist, computer scientist and politician, who currently serves as the incumbent President of Armenia. He served as Prime Minister of Armenia from 4 November 1996 to 20 March 1997 and previously was the country’s (longest-serving) ambassador in London since 1998. Sarkissian assumed the presidency on 9 April 2018. Armen Sarkissian […]

Russell Schweickart

Russell “Rusty” Schweickart is an American aeronautical engineer, and a former NASA astronaut, research scientist, U.S. Air Force fighter pilot, as well as a former business executive and government executive. Selected in 1963 for NASA’s third astronaut group, he is best known as the Lunar Module Pilot on the 1969 Apollo 9 mission, the first manned flight test of the Lunar Module, on which he performed the first in-space test […]

Robert Williams

Professor Robert Williams, an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), is President of the International Astronomical Union. (IAU). He is an STScI Distinguished Research Scholar and Adjunct Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Physics and Astronomy Department in Baltimore. Professor Williams served as Hubble STScI Director from 1993 until 1998, before which he had […]

Donna Strickland

Dr. Donna Strickland is one of the recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2018 for co-inventing Chirped Pulse Amplification with Dr. Gérard Mourou, her PhD supervisor at the time of the discovery. She earned her PhD in optics from the University of Rochester and her B. Eng. from McMaster University. Dr. Strickland was a […]

Gerald Griffin

Gerry Griffin is the former Director of the NASA Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston. In prior positions at NASA he served as the Deputy Director of the John F. Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the Hugh F. Dryden (now Neil A. Armstrong) Flight Research Center in California. At NASA Headquarters in Washington […]