2015 Jansky Lecturer: Dr. Nick Scoville

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is pleased to announce that Dr. Nick Scoville has been selected to present the 50th annual Jansky Lecture, entitled Star and Planet Formation through Cosmic Time.

The first lecture will take place on Tuesday, November 3, at 7:00 pm in Gilmer Hall 190 at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia.  The second lecture will take place in Socorro, New Mexico on Friday, November 6, at 7:30 pm at the Workman Center on campus at New Mexico Tech.  The final lecture of the series will take place in Green Bank, West Virginia in the spring of 2016, date and time are TBD.

Scoville leads the Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS), a project that uses data from virtually every large space- and ground-based telescope, including the NRAO's Very Large Array, to study the large-scale structure of the Universe and the evolution of galaxies over a vast range of cosmic time. Begun in 2004 with a large allocation of observing time on the Hubble Space Telescope, COSMOS now has detected more than a million galaxies spanning cosmic time back to the first billion years of the Universe. He is currently using the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) to investigate the evolution of star formation and colliding starburst galaxies in the early Universe.

A professor at Caltech since 1983, Scoville received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1972. He was a pioneer in millimeter-wave astronomy and is a leading expert in studies of galaxy evolution, the nature of the dense interstellar molecular gas in galaxies, and star formation. He is a past director of Caltech's Owens Valley Radio Observatory, and has served on numerous national committees. In his spare time, he enjoys doing sculptural welding projects.

Author of more than 600 publications in observational and theoretical astrophysics, Scoville's previous awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Aaronson Award of the University of Arizona, and serving as Bishop Lecturer at Columbia University.

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