Robert Kennicutt

Robert Charles Kennicutt, Jr. FRS is Laureate Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory and University Distinguished Professor at Texas A&M University, where he also serves as the Executive Director of the George P. and Cynthia Woods Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy. He earned his PhD from the University of Washington in 1978, and has held faculty positions at the University of Minnesota (1980-1988), the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory (1988-2007), and at the University of Cambridge (2005-2017), where he held the Plumian Professorship of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy.  At Cambridge he also served as Director of the Institute of Astronomy (2008-2011) and as Head of the School of Physical Sciences (2011-2015).  He also has served as the Editor-in-Chief of The Astrophysical Journal (1999-2006).  In 2019-22 he co-chaired (with Fiona Harrison) the National Academy of Sciences Decadal Survey of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Kennicutt was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001, a Member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2006, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 2011.  He has served as Vice President of the American Astronomical Society, which also awarded him its Dannie Heineman Prize in Astrophysics in 2007. In 2019 he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Professor Kennicutt's research has focused on observations of nearby galaxies aimed at understanding their star formation and evolution, and on calibrating the extragalactic distance scale.  With Wendy Freedman and Jeremy Mould he served as Co-PI of the Hubble Space Telescope Extragalactic Distance Scale Key Project, for which the trio received the 2009 Gruber Cosmology Prize.  Kennicutt has also led a number of international legacy projects using the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Herschel Space Observatory, and the Galaxy Evolution Explorer.