2026 Jansky Lecturer: Prof. John E. Carlstrom

2026_JCarlstrom.jpgThe NRAO is pleased to award the 2026 Karl G. Jansky Lectureship to Professor John E. Carlstrom, Chair and Chandrasekhar Distinguished Service Professor, Departments of Astronomy and Astrophysics and Physics at the University of Chicago. The Jansky Lectureship is an honor established by the trustees of AUI to recognize and celebrate outstanding contributions to the advancement of radio astronomy.

He earned his A.B. in Physics from Vassar College in 1981 and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1988. He was a Millikan Research Fellow in astrophysics at the California Institute of Technology (1989-91) where he also taught (1991-1995). He joined the University of Chicago faculty in 1995.

Professor Carlstrom leads world-renowned research in the field of observational cosmology, studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB), and Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) effect. He is the director of the South Pole Telescope (SPT), a 10-meter telescope project that completed the 2,500 square-degree SPT-SZ survey in three bands at arc-minute resolution, and the SPTpol survey of 500 square degrees to unprecedented sensitivity. The group has since deployed SPT-3G with 16,260 bolometric detectors to make deep polarization maps. The SPT has made precise measurements of the CMB that led to the discovery of hundreds of clusters of galaxies going back to when the universe was about one-third its present age, providing a history of the growth of the large-scale structure of the universe, and offering strong evidence that the structure in the CMB is a remnant of quantum fluctuations consistent with the theory of inflation.

He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2000, a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 2002, and Senior Member of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics. Professor Carlstrom has received recognition from the scientific community as a 1998 MacArthur Fellow, the 2004 Magellanic Gold Model, the 2006 Beatrice Tinsley Prize, co-recipient of the 2015 Gruber Prize in Cosmology, and was elected a Legacy Fellow of the AAS in 2020.

The public lecture dates for this fall will be announced soon.

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