Dr. Gerard A. Kriss

Gerard A. Kriss is an Associate Research Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy of The Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Kriss serves as Project Scientist for the Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope project, directing the day-to-day operations and serving as the primary contact with NASA, and he is also a member of the Instrument Definition Team for the Faint Object Spectrograph on the Hubble Space Telescope. Dr. Kriss came to Johns Hopkins in 1985 to work with the HUT and FOS teams. For the Astro-1 mission he coordinated simultaneous observations with other ground-based and space-based observatories and helped to develop the data reduction and analysis system for HUT.

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Dr. Kriss developed an interest in amateur astronomy in junior high school. While an undergraduate in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he became professionally interested in astronomy through research with a group flying high energy X-ray detectors on high altitude balloons. His work in graduate school at MIT branched out into other wavelengths as he made optical observations of quasars and active galaxies in support of the newly launched Einstein X-ray Observatory. He earned his Ph.D. in 1982 under the supervision of Claude R. Canizares with a thesis entitled "X-ray and Optical Studies of Active Galactic Nuclei and Quasi-stellar Objects". Moving on to the University of Michigan as an Assistant Professor/Post-doctoral Scholar, Dr. Kriss studied the mass and dynamics of clusters of galaxies using X-ray images from the Einstein Observatory and optical spectra and photometry obtained at the McGraw-Hill Observatory of the University of Michigan.

Dr. Kriss's current research concentrates on observations of quasars and active galaxies, at all wavelengths from the X-ray through the radio. He has been a guest observer with the International Ultraviolet Explorer, the Hubble Space Telescope, the X-ray astronomy satellites EXOSAT, ROSAT, and ASCA, and has observed at Kitt Peak National Observatory, Cerro Tololo Inter-american Observatory in Chile, and the Very Large Array in New Mexico. Using far-ultraviolet HUT spectra and HST images and spectra of quasars and Seyfert galaxies, he is searching for evidence of accretion disks around supermassive black holes and clues to the internal structure of active galaxies. This research is supported in part by a 5-year grant from the NASA Long-Term Space Astrophysics program awarded to Dr. Kriss and Drs. Zlatan Tsvetanov, Holland Ford, Arthur Davidsen, and Wei Zheng. A list of his publications is available.

Dr. Kriss and his wife, Andrea, live in Lutherville, MD, with their two children Jonathan (5) and Katharine (1).

Last updated October 1995.

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