David Spergel
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Dr. David Nathaniel Spergel (born March 25, 1961, in Rochester, New York) is an American theoretical astrophysicist and Princeton University professor known for his work on the WMAP mission. Professor Spergel is occasionally regarded as America's premier astrophysicist and is a MacArthur Fellow. He is currently the chair of the Astrophysics Subcommittee of the NASA Advisory Council and was once the W.M. Keck distinguished visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Not only has he focused on deciphering the data that the Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP) beams back from space, he was part of the team that dreamed up the mission and designed the satellite that would carry it out.
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[edit] Research
His interests range from the search for planets around nearby stars to the shape of the universe. Over the last few years, the WMAP Satellite has been the main focus of his research. His WMAP papers are currently the #1 and #2 most cited new papers in all of science. WMAP was successfully launched on June 30, 2001. He is also interested in understanding how galaxies form and evolve. Spergel's thesis work was on dark matter and he has recently returned to this field, exploring the possibility that the dark matter has strong self-interactions. Dr. Spergel is among a group of scientists and engineers at Princeton University who are developing new technologies attempting to enable the direct imaging of earth-like planets around nearby stars.
"Beginning as an undergraduate at Princeton in the early 1980s, he navigated from one problem to another. He began studying the Milky Way and, along with Leo Blitz of the University of Maryland, College Park, discovered that our galaxy is not just a simple spiral of stars and gas but rather a complex construction with warped edges and a bar of stars across the middle. Then he began thinking about dark matter and realized that Earth should feel a "wind" of particles as it orbits the galaxy. He next took on the mystery of cosmic structure, why galaxies clump together in huge clusters rather than spread uniformly throughout space. He and a colleague suggested that the reason was knots of warped space-time called "topological defects." The idea was brilliant, but observations proved it quite wrong. Spergel declared it dead and moved on. It was that display of intellectual honesty, Spergel suspects, that earned him an invitation to work on the microwave satellite. And once having delighted in undertaking the technical aspects of rocket science, he could not resist an invitation to help design a second spacecraft. The goal of this new mission is to find Earth-like planets orbiting other stars, and it requires solving optical problems that astronomers have never before confronted." [1]
[edit] Education
Bachelor's degree (Astronomy summa cum laude), Princeton University, 1982; visiting scholar, Oxford University, 1983; master's degree (Astronomy), Harvard University, 1984; doctorate (Astronomy), Harvard University, 1985, Thesis title: Astrophysical Implications of Weakly-Interacting Massive Particles.
[edit] Notes
Dr. Spergel is an avid bicyclist and skier.
[edit] References
[http://www.in-cites.com/hotpapers/shp/1-50.html "Super Hot" Papers in Science Published Since 2003]
