2024 Jansky Lecturer: Ken Kellermann

The NRAO is pleased to award the 2024 Karl G. Jansky Lectureship to Dr. Ken Kellermann, Senior Scientist, Emeritus at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. The Jansky Lectureship is an honor established by the trustees of AUI to recognize and celebrate outstanding contributions to the advancement of radio astronomy.

Ken earned his S.B. in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1959 and his Ph.D. in physics and astronomy at the California Institute of Technology under John Bolton in 1963, studying the radio spectra of galactic and extragalactic radio sources. He joined the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in 1965. He has served as NRAO's Acting Assistant Director for Green Bank Operations, as Chief Scientist, and as head of its New Initiatives Office.

Ken's studies of radio galaxies, quasars, and cosmology cover more than a half-century of research. His collaborations with scientists and radio telescope facilities around the world in the development of Very Long Baseline Interferometry resulted in the construction of NRAO's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) in 1993. The unprecedented angular resolution, surpassing that of optical telescopes, has led to many discoveries in both galactic and extragalactic science as well as a variety of terrestrial phenomena. The fundamental text Galactic and Extragalactic Radio Astronomy, edited by Verschuur and Kellermann, has been used for decades by many researchers and students in the field.

Ken is the co-author of Open Skies: The National Radio Astronomy Observatory and Its Impact on US Radio Astronomy with Ellen Bouton and Sierra Brandt. This open access book on the history of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory covers the scientific discoveries and technical innovations of late 20th century radio astronomy with particular attention to the people and institutions involved.

More recently his book with Ellen Bouton, Star Noise: Discovering the Radio Universe, tells the fascinating story of the remarkable, mostly accidental, or serendipitous discoveries in radio astronomy that have transformed our view of the Universe. Star Noise is about the men and women who made the discoveries, the circumstances that enabled them, and the unanticipated ways that scientific research really works.

Ken won the Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy from the American Astronomical Society in 1971, the Benjamin Apthorp Gould Prize of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Bruce Medal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in 2014. He is a member of the AAS, IAU, URSI, the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and an External Member of the Max Planck Institute für Radio Astronomy.

His lecture will be entitled "Discovering the Radio Universe".