Alyssa Ann Goodman is Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University, a Research Associate of the Smithsonian Institution, and the Founding Director of the Harvard Initiative in Innovative Computing.[1] Goodman and her research group at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts study the dense gas between the stars. They are particularly interested in how this interstellar gas arranges itself into new stars. Their investigations use a variety of observational techniques covering the spectrum from X-ray to radio.
Goodman is principal investigator of the COMPLETE Survey of Star-Forming Regions,[2] which is mapping out three very large star-forming regions in our galaxy in their entirety. These three regions were also observed by the Spitzer Space Telescope, under the c2d "Legacy" Program.[3] The COMPLETE and c2d Surveys combined represent a database more than one thousand times larger than the largest similar work before. The database is allowing astrophysicists to address questions such as, "how many stars like the Sun can form from a given mass of gas in the Milky Way?".
In 2008-9, Goodman is "Scholar-in-Residence" at WGBH, on a sabbatical. She is also working closely with Curtis Wong and Jonathan Fay on the Microsoft WorldWide Telescope project.
Goodman received her undergraduate degree in Physics from MIT in 1984 and a Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard in 1989. She held a President's Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley from 1989 to 1992, after which she took up a post as Assistant Professor of Astronomy at Harvard. Goodman received the 1997 Newton Lacy Pierce Prize from the American Astronomical Society for her work on interstellar matter, and she became full professor at Harvard in 1999.