Christopher David Impey | |
|---|---|
| Born | (1956-01-25)25 January 1956 (age 69) Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom |
| Alma mater | Imperial College London(BSc) University of Edinburgh(PhD)[1] |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Astronomy,observational cosmology, education |
| Institutions | University of Arizona California Institute of Technology University of Hawaiʻi |
Christopher David Impey (born 25 January 1956) is a Britishastronomer, educator, and author. He has been a faculty member at theUniversity of Arizona since 1986. Impey has done research onobservational cosmology, in particularlow surface brightness galaxies, theintergalactic medium, and surveys ofactive galaxies andquasars. As an educator, he has pioneered the use ofinstructional technology for teaching science to undergraduatenon-science majors. He has written many technical articles and a series of popular science books includingThe Living Cosmos,How It Began,How It Ends: From You to the Universe,Dreams of Other Worlds, andHumble Before the Void. He served as Vice-President of theAmerican Astronomical Society, he is a Fellow of theAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor. He serves on the Advisory Council ofMETI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence).
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Impey was born inEdinburgh, Scotland, and spent his childhood mostly in New York and London, attending 11 schools. He got a 1st class honours BSc in Physics atImperial College of Science and Technology, part of theUniversity of London, in 1977. After an internship working on a neutrino calorimeter atCERN underJack Steinberger, he went to theUniversity of Edinburgh for graduate school in astronomy. He earned a PhD under the supervision of Peter Brand and Ray Wolstencroft in 1981.
He worked at theInstitute for Astronomy at theUniversity of Hawaiʻi from 1981 to 1983 as a UK Science Research Council/NATO Fellow, then atCalifornia Institute of Technology from 1983 to 1986 as a Weingart Fellow. Impey has been on the faculty of the Department of Astronomy/Steward Observatory at theUniversity of Arizona since 1986, since 2000 as a University Distinguished Professor. He is Deputy Department Head in charge of academic programs, leading the nation's largest undergraduate astronomy majors program, its second largest astronomy PhD program, and one of the largest programs to teach astronomy to non-science majors.
Working mostly in the fields ofextragalactic astronomy andobservational cosmology, Impey has over 170 refereed publications and 70 published conference proceedings. His early work was on the sub-class ofactive galactic nuclei calledBL Lac objects, now thought to be highly luminous and variable extragalactic sources where our sightline looks nearly down the spin axis of asupermassive black hole emitting twin relativistic jets.[2] In the 1980s he was a heavy user of the first wave oflarge optical telescopes onMauna Kea in Hawaii.
As a postdoc atCaltech he worked with Greg Bothun at theUniversity of Oregon on the properties of dim and diffuse stellar systems that tend to be missing from most galaxy surveys.[3] Working with the noted AustralianastrophotographerDavid Malin, they discovered the largest spiral galaxy known, dubbedMalin 1.[4] He also continued his thesis work on BL Lac objects, using a travellingpolarimeter that toured many of the world's observatories, includingKitt Peak in Arizona,Palomar in California,Las Campanas andCerro Tololo in Chile,Sutherland in South Africa, and theSpecial Astrophysical Observatory in theCaucasus region of Russia.[5]
He was a heavy early user of theHubble Space Telescope, getting time in each of the first eight cycles of observation. AtSteward Observatory in the 1990s, he studied theintergalactic medium using multiplequasars to probe the three dimensional structure of the hot, diffuse gas in galaxies,[6] which contains as manybaryons as the sum of all the stars in the universe.[7] He also studiedgravitational lensing using the exquisite image quality and stability of theHST.[8]
Over the past decade, he has been a major participant of theCosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS), led byNick Scoville at Caltech. He led the spectroscopic follow-up of active galaxies and quasars selected by theirX-ray emission, with a goal of charting the growth and fuelling rate of the massiveblack holes that are now known to exist in every galaxy.[9] Impey's research has been supported by over $20 million in grants fromNASA and theNational Science Foundation.
Impey is a pioneer in the use ofinstructional technology in the classroom. He was the lead author of theUniversity of Arizona plan for instructional computing in the 1990s and he gave the first invited education talk at anAmerican Astronomical Society meeting. He has been on the editorial boards of theAstronomy Education Review and theEncyclopedia of the Cosmos, and served on the board of directors of theAstronomical Society of the Pacific. He is on the International Executive Committee of theInspiration of Astronomical Phenomena series of meetings. He has written over 40 articles on education, pedagogy, and science literacy.
He is the winner of seven teaching awards at the University of Arizona and he has taught over 5000 students, mostly in introductory astronomy classes for non-science majors. He taught part of anastrobiology class in the 3D virtual world calledSecond Life, and more recently he has taught amassive open online course (MOOC) to over 2000 people using theUdemy platform. Impey is the creator of the web siteTeach Astronomy, which has gone from peak traffic of 100 visitors a day after its launch in 2012 to 600–700 visitors a day one year later. Teach Astronomy has a full online textbook, over a thousand short video clips, and it also aggregates articles fromWikipedia, nearly 10,000 astronomical images and over a thousandpodcasts.
Impey enjoys conveying the excitement of astronomy to general audiences. Several times he has been an eclipse cruise lecturer, and since 2000 he has been a Harlow Shapley Visiting Lecturer and aSmithsonian Associates Lecturer. In 2007, he was a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar. He has given the Cave lecture at theUniversity of Kingston, the Benjamin Dean Lecture at theCalifornia Academy of Sciences, aTEDx lecture in Tucson, and the Robinson Lecture at theArmagh Observatory in Northern Ireland. He gives about twenty public talks a year, to audiences as diverse as kindergartners, NASA engineers, andTibetan Buddhist monks. In 2014, he was named aHoward Hughes Medical Institute Professor, and awarded $1 million to improve undergraduate education.[10]
Impey has written a number of popular science books, marked by their incorporation of cutting edge research, and the use of vignettes that place the reader in unfamiliar scenes.The Living Cosmos (2007) is a survey of the emerging field ofastrobiology, published initially byRandom House and in 2011 republished byCambridge University Press.
Also with Cambridge University Press, he published a set of interviews with leading researchers in astrobiology, calledTalking About Life (2010). He has edited a book on astrobiology based on his long-time association with theVatican Observatory astronomers, calledFrontiers of Astrobiology. He edited a book on the ethical and philosophical implications of the search forextraterrestrial life calledEncountering Life in the Universe.
With planetary scientistBill Hartmann he wrote two introductory textbooks for college-level astronomy,The Cosmic Journey (1994) andThe Universe Revealed (2000). On the subject ofcosmology, he has written about the origin of the Universe inHow It Began (2012) and about the long-term fate of the Universe inHow It Ends (2010). With English professor Holly Henry he has written a survey of the scientific and cultural impact of iconic NASA missions inDreams of Other Worlds (2013). His most recent book,Humble Before the Void (2014), based on teaching cosmology toTibetan Buddhists in India as part of theScience for Monks program. In 2013, he published his first novel,Shadow World.
