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 […]
Apollo 11
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 […]
Eric Betzig
After obtaining a BS in Physics from Caltech, Eric Betzig moved to Cornell, where his thesis involved the development of near-field optics — the first method to break the diffraction barrier in light microscopy. He then became a PI at AT&T Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ, where he further refined the technology and explored […]
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins is an English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford’s Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008. Dawkins first came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centred view of evolution and […]
Garik Israelian
Dr Israelian, an astrophysicist at the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (Spain), is the creative director and spiritual father of the STARMUS Festival. In 1999 he led a collaboration reported in the journal Nature that found the first observational evidence that supernova explosions are responsible for the formation of black holes. His research has led […]