Chris Impey
University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA.
INSAP Review Paper
Abstract
The Inspiration of Astronomical Phenomena
An overview of the diverse ways in which the phenomena of astronomy have penetrated and enriched culture(e.g. the pumpernickel in a loaf of marble rye). Humans have always been able to keep the universe in their heads, but that universe has grown from the proximate, sheltering canopy of stars to a vast panoply of planets, stars, galaxies and cosmic cataclysms. These phenomena have inspired and insinuated themselves into the humanities, literature, the visual and performing arts and new forms of excpression made possible by computers and the Internet. This multimedia tour attempts to recapitulate and encapsulate the INSAP concept.
Biographical Details
Chris Impey is a University Distinguished Professor and Deputy Head of the Department, in charge of all academic programmes. His research interests are observational cosmology, gravitational lensing, and the evolution and structure of galaxies. He has 160 refereed publications and 60 conference proceedings, and his work has been supported by $18 million in grants from NASA and the NSF. As a professor, he has won eleven teaching awards, and has been heavily involved in curriculum and instructional technology development. Impey is a past Vice President of the American Astronomical Society. He has also been an NSF Distinguished Teaching Scholar, a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, and the Carnegie Council on Teaching's Arizona Professor of the Year. Impey has written over thirty popular articles on cosmology and astrobiology and co-authored two introductory textbooks. His first popular book The Living Cosmos, was published in 2007 by Random House; his second, How It Ends, will be published in 2010 by Norton. He was a co-chair of the Education and Public Outreach Study Group for the Astronomy Decadal Survey of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2009 he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.bsite