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Dr. Chris Howk is a research scientist
at The Johns Hopkins University where he works with
the Far Ultraviolet
Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) team. He received
his B.A. in Physics from Hanover
College, a small liberal arts school in Indiana,
in 1994. From there he moved to graduate school
at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison, obtaining his Ph.D. from
the Astronomy Department in March 1999 under
the guidance of Dr. Blair Savage. Howk left the
cold confines of Wisconsin for the warmer shores
of the Chesapeake, joining the FUSE group at Johns
Hopkins in Baltimore, Maryland, shortly after receiving
his degree.
Though he went to college intending to study medicine,
physics led his heart and mind to follow another
career path. "I decided to study astronomy, of all
the branches of physics, because it seemed to have
the greatest number of unanswered questions. In
astronomy you learn something new and surprising
almost every day."
As an undergraduate, Howk spent a summer doing
research at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green
Bank, West Virginia. His experiences with radio
astronomy not only cemented his desire to study
astronomy, but introduced him to studies of the
gas and dust between the stars (the so-called interstellar
medium), which dominate his research interests to
this day.
At Wisconsin, Howk focussed on studies of the
interstellar medium. He used the spectrographs on
board the Hubble Space Telescope to study the motions
and composition of the gas in our own Milky Way.
However, for his thesis he extended his gaze to
other galaxies, studying edge-on systems such as
NGC 4013 with the newly commissioned WIYN observatory. WIYN (Wisconsin-Indiana-Yale-NOAO)
is a 3.5-meter new technology telescope at Kitt
Peak National Observatory, near Tucson, Arizona.
Since that time, he has spent much of his time analyzing
the large amount of data being produced by the FUSE
mission.
In his spare time, Howk enjoys playing ultimate frisbee, singing, and sailing on the Bay.
He also has been known to read a Patrick O'Brian
novel while listening to Great
Big Sea and drinking a Guinness. 
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