Science and Technology Guest of Honor

Astrophysicist, UV/Optical Astronomy Branch, Laboratory for Astronomy and Solar Physics, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

website: http://lasp.gsfc.nasa.gov

Joseph F. Dolan did his undergraduate work in Physics at St. Bonaventure University and his graduate work in Astronomy and Astrophysics at Harvard University. After appointments at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Case Western Reserve University, he has been at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center since 1977, with occasional interludes at Stanford University and San Diego State University as a visiting professor. While at Goddard he has been a member of the OSO-8 High Energy Spectrometer Team, the HIPPARCOS Astrometric Satellite Team and the Hubble Space Telescope High Speed Photometer Team. He was cited by Hans Bethe as the discoverer of binary X-ray sources. Dolan is a member of the International Astronomical Union and the American Astronomical Society, for which he has delivered several Shapley lectures. His interest in gravitational lenses stems from several papers he has published on the size of Lyman-alpha clouds in the gravitational lens Q0957+561. He is currently working on a book about the rules of evidence scientists use to discover truth about the physical universe.

Research Interests:
X-Ray and Gamma-Ray Astronomy; Astronomical Polarization; Neutron Stars; Black Holes

Education:
B.S. (Physics) St. Bonaventure University, 1961 M.S. (Astronomy) Harvard University, 1963 Ph.D. (Astrophysics) Harvard University, 1966

Affiliations:
Member: International Astronomical Union,American Astronomical Society MISSION PARTICIPATION: High Speed Photometer, Hubble Space Telescope, Co-Investigator HIPPARCOS Astrometric Satellite, Co-Principal Investigator High Energy X-Ray Spectrometer, OSO-8, Guest Investigator

Related Activities:
Referee: Astrophysical Journal; Nature; Astronomy and Astrophysics Proposal Evaluator: National Science Foundation; U. S. Civilian Research Foundation for the Independent States of the Former Soviet Union Consultant: "Astronomical Almanac", U.S. Naval Observatory Shapley Lecturer, American Astronomical Society Author of more than 100 papers in the scientific literature