This
image of the Whirlpool Galaxy was planned, observed
and processed by members of the 2005 Hubble Heritage
Team. Biographies are available on the Heritage
Team Home Page. Biographies of other
co-investigators on the observations are below.
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Stephen Beckwith |
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(STScI)
Steven Beckwith is the Director of the Space Telescope
Science Institute (STScI) on the campus of Johns
Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and a
Professor of Physics and Astronomy at JHU.
His background is in engineering and physics. He
attended the engineering school at Cornell University
as an undergraduate from 1970 to 1973, receiving
a B.S. with distinction in Engineering Physics in
1973. From 1973 to 1978, he did graduate work in
physics at the California Institute of Technology,
receiving a Ph.D. in Physics in 1978. He then joined
the faculty of Cornell University in the astronomy
department, where he taught for 13 years, as a professor.
During that time, he held a number of visiting positions
at Arcetri Observatory (Florence, Italy), the University
of California at Berkeley, the California Institute
of Technology, and the Max-Planck-Institute fuer
Astronomie (Heidelberg, Germany).
In 1991, he moved to Heidelberg, Germany as one
of two directors of the Max-Planck- Institut fuer
Astronomie (MPIA), and later became Managing Director
of the MPIA in 1994, where he ran the German national
observatory, the Calar Alto Observatory in southern
Spain. He was Managing Director of MPIA until 1998,
when he moved back to the United States to become
the Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute.
His principal research interests are the formation
and early evolution of planets including those outside
the Solar System, and the birth of galaxies in the
early universe. He has published over 100 research
articles, and lectures extensively to the general
public and professional audiences. He has won several
awards in the United States and Europe for his research;
he was elected as a member of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences in 2004.
Steven Beckwith resides in Ruxton, Maryland with
his wife, Susan McCormick, and his children, Martha
and Thomas, with whom he enjoys skiing, fishing,
bicycle touring, and traveling.
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Robert Kennicutt |
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(University
of Arizona)
Robert Kennicutt is currently a Professor of Astronomy
at the
University of Arizona, where he divides his time
between research,
teaching, and serving as the Editor-of-Chief of
The Astrophysical Journal,
the largest and most prestigious U.S. professional
journal in astronomy.
He grew up near Binghamton, New York and earned
his undergraduate
degree in physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
After that he
moved to Seattle and earned his masters and doctoral
degrees in
astronomy at the University of Washington. He held
a faculty position
for 8 years at the University of Minnesota before
moving to Arizona in
1988. Later this year he will move to the University
of Cambridge in
England as the Plumian Professor of Astronomy and
Natural Philosophy.
Robert has spent most of his astronomy career studying
the evolution
of galaxies and the formation of stars in galaxies.
M51 has been
one of his favorite objects of study over this entire
time. In
addition to being involved in several Hubble Space
Telescope projects
including Co-Principal Investigator on the Extragalactic
Distance
Scale Key Project, he currently leads the Spitzer
Infrared Nearby
Galaxies Survey (SINGS), which is making an in-depth
study of nearby
star forming galaxies including M51. He is also
an avid rockhound and
spends much of his spare time hunting for rocks,
fossils, and gemstones
in the deserts of Arizona and the mountain west. |
