Science and Engineering Scholarships and Fellowships Blog

“I am giving many public lectures, to help the public understand the work we have done and hope to do in the future, and to inspire young people to be as excited about science as I am.” Dr. John Mather

Dr. John Mather is currently a Senior Astrophysicist in the Observational Cosmology Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. He attended Swarthmore College in 1964 and in 1968 was a recipient of National Science Foundation Fellowship which he used to fund his master’s and doctoral degree in physics at University of California, Berkeley.

As a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, he led the proposal efforts on the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE). The success of COBE was the outcome of prodigious team work involving more than 1,000 researchers, engineers and other participants. John Mather lead the project and was the main party responsible for the experiment that revealed the blackbody form of the microwave background radiation measured by COBE. His colleague, Dr. George Smoot, had the main responsibility for measuring the small variations in the temperature of the radiation on the COBE project.

In 2006 Dr. John Mather and Dr. George Smoot were recognized jointly for their exemplary work on COBE and received the Nobel Prize in Physics. From the years 1980 to 2006 Dr. Mather wrote The Very First Light on the process of creating COBE and continued his work with NASA on The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which would be his passion for years to come. The JWST is now planned for launch in 2013. Mather’s role as “senior project scientist” means he chairs the science working group and ensures the mission will meet the scientific requirements. The observatory is fine-tuned to search for extra-solar planets, dark matter and dark energy. The JWST’s infrared cameras will also detect the faint light from the first stars and galaxies to form in the universe, over 13 billion years ago.

* This information is from The Nobel Foundation and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Related: NSF Graduate Research Fellow Profiles – NobelPrize.org – NSF Graduate Research Fellow Profile – Burton Richter