Princeton University

 
Alicia Soderberg is a Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow and a Carnegie-Princeton Fellow at Princeton University. She studies exploding and erupting stars, using many different kinds of telescopes.

She earned her doctoral degree in astrophysics in 2007 from the California Institute of Technology. Her dissertation focused on understanding cosmic explosions with special attention to gamma-ray bursts and supernovae. To do this, she combined data from all wavelengths, using the Very Large Array radio facility in New Mexico and Palomar Observatory in California.

Before arriving at Caltech, she received a master's degree in applied mathematics from the University of Cambridge in England in 2001, where she studied Part III of the Mathematical Tripos. She was a member of Cambridge's Churchill College, and she also studied gamma-ray bursts at its Institute of Astronomy.

Soderberg earned her bachelor's degree in 2000 from Bates College in Maine with a double major in physics and math. She spent summers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., Kitt Peak National Observatory in Tucson, Ariz., Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, Arecibo Radio Observatory in Puerto Rico and Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M. She also spent a semester at Harvard University studying physics through the visiting undergraduate student program.

She grew up in Falmouth, Mass., on Cape Cod, where she spent her summers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute researching the water pollution affecting the cape's coastal ponds.

Lynn Cominsky is the press officer, a co-investigator and the education and public outreach lead for NASA's Swift satellite mission. She works at Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, Calif., where she is also the chair of the physics and astronomy department.

In addition, Cominsky is a scientific co-investigator, the education and public outreach lead and the press officer for the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) mission, due for launch in June 2008. Since 2003, she has led the education and public outreach program for the U.S. portion of the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton satellite mission. She currently is leading education and public outreach efforts for other missions under study, including the Energetic X-ray Imaging Survey Telescope (EXIST) and the SuperNova/Acceleration Probe (SNAP).

In 1993, Cominsky was named both Outstanding Professor by Sonoma State University and California Professor of the Year by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education. Since 1998, she has been the deputy press officer for the American Astronomical Society. In this position, she often interprets astronomical discoveries to the public. In 2008, she was named a fellow of the California Council on Science and Technology.

Neil Gehrels is the principal investigator for the Swift gamma-ray burst Medium Explorer (MIDEX) mission. His other responsibilities include serving as deputy project scientist for the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) with responsibility for overseeing the GLAST Science Support Center, project scientist for the Compton Observatory (1991-2000) and mission scientist for the International Gamma-ray Astrophysics Laboratory (INTEGRAL).

Gehrels is also the chief of the Astroparticle Physics Laboratory, at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., an adjunct professor of astronomy at the University of Maryland and an adjunct professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University.

Numerous awards have been bestowed upon Gehrels including the American Astronomical Society's Bruno Rossi Prize in 2007, Popular Science Magazine's "Best of What's New" award for Swift satellite research in 2006 and two awards in 2005: the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal and the Goddard Space Flight Center Lindsay Award. In 2000, the American Astronautical Society awarded him the Randolph Lovelace Award. He was named a fellow of the American Physical Society in 1993, won a NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal that same year and, in 1992, received the Discover Magazine Award for Technological Innovation. In 2008, he was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Robert Kirshner is the Harvard College Professor of Astronomy and Clowes Professor of Science at Harvard University. He is the author of more than 200 research papers dealing with supernovae and observational cosmology. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1998 and the American Philosophical Society in 2004. He served as president of the American Astronomical Society from 2003 to 2005. Kirshner was given the Distinguished Alumni Award by Caltech in 2004.

Kirshner is a frequent public lecturer on science. He is also the teacher of Science A-35, a core curriculum course for Harvard undergraduates titled "The Energetic Universe." His popular book, "The Extravagant Universe: Exploding Stars, Dark Energy and the Accelerating Cosmos," was published by Princeton University Press. It won the Association of American Publishers Award for Best Professional/Scholarly Book in Physics and Astronomy and was a finalist for the 2003 Aventis Prize. It has been translated into Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish and Czech.