Charles L. Bennett

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Charles L. Bennett

Dr. Charles L. Bennett (born November 1956) is an American observational astrophysicist and a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the Johns Hopkins University.[1] He is the Principal Investigator of NASA's highly successful Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP).[2] Prior to 2005, Bennett was a Senior Scientist for Experimental Cosmology, Goddard Senior Fellow, and Infrared Astrophysics Branch Head at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.[3] Bennett was at the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism during the summers from 1976 to 1978.[4]

His National Academy of Sciences (NAS) membership citation states, "As leader of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) mission, Bennett has helped quantify, with unprecedented precision and accuracy, many key properties of the universe, including its age, the dark and baryonic matter content, the cosmological constant, and the Hubble constant."[5] Membership is a great honor bestowed upon the most distinguished scholars in engineering and the sciences.[6] He was awarded the 2005 National Academy of Sciences Henry Draper Medal [7] for his leadership of WMAP.

Bennett is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society.[8] In 2002, ISI named him the most Highly Cited Researcher in space science worldwide.[9] He is an author of the top two "Super Hot Papers in Science" published since 2003.[10]

Before leading WMAP, Bennett was the Deputy Principal Investigator for the Differential Microwave Radiometers (DMR) instrument on the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) mission that discovered the anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation. The Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) Science Team also precisely measured the spectrum of the cosmic microwave background radiation. The 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to the COBE leader and Principal Investigator of the Far Infrared Absolute Spectrophotometer (FIRAS) instrument John C. Mather and to DMR Principal Investigator George Smoot.[11]

[edit] Awards

Bennett's awards include:[12]

2006 Harvey Prize

2006 Gruber Cosmology Prize (awarded to John Mather and the COBE Team for "ground-breaking studies confirming that our universe was born in a hot Big Bang."[13][14]