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John P. Huchra
John P. Huchra, is the Robert O. and Holly Thomis Doyle Professor of Cosmology at Harvard University, and Harvard's newly appointed Vice Provost for Research Policy.
He received his B.S. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970, and his Ph.D. in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology in 1977. He came to Harvard in 1976 as a Center for Astrophysics (CfA) Postdoctoral Fellow. He was an Astronomer, then Senior Astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and served as CfA's Associate Director for Optical and Infrared Astronomy and the Director of the Smithsonian's F. L. Whipple Observatory. He was
appointed Professor of Astronomy at Harvard in 1984, and the Robert O. and Holly Thomis Doyle Professor of Cosmology in 2002. He is an observational extragalactic astronomer interested in stellar populations and star formation in galaxies, osmology, the dynamics of groups and clusters of galaxies, Seyfert galaxies, the large scale structure of the universe. Huchra is best known for his work on the Cosmic Distance Scale and on Mapping the Universe, in particular, with Dr. Margaret Geller, the discovery of the Great Wall of galaxies and the bubble-like distribution of galaxies in space. In the course of his mapping, he discovered the nearest gravitational lens. His largest current project is the 2 Micron All Sky Survey, a program that has used two small telescopes, one in each hemisphere, to make an extremely accurate and well calibrated map of the sky in near infrared light. 2MASS is the first of the new generation of maps of the whole sky done with electronic detectors.
Prof. Huchra is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His other honors include the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Newcomb Cleveland Award and the Aaronson Prize. He is also a fellow of the American Physical Society (1992), and the AAAS (1994).
Prof. Huchra served as chair of the Board of Directors of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (the organization that operates the US National Optical Observatories for the NSF and the Space Telescope Science Institute for NASA), and has chaired both the Committee on Astronomy and Astrophysics and the Board on Physics and Astronomy for the National Research Council/National Academy of Science.
In his spare time he has a fascination for the outdoors --- canoeing, hiking, backcountry skiing --- mountaintops in general.