Christopher F. McKee

Christopher Fulton McKee (born September 6, 1942 in Washington, DC ) is an American astrophysicist.

McKee studied at Phillips Academy and Harvard University (bachelor's degrees) and received his PhD in 1970 from George B. Field at the University of California, Berkeley . In 1969/70 he was at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory . As a post-doctoral student he was at Caltech and from 1971 to 1974 Assistant Professor at Harvard. In 1974 he became Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Berkeley and in 1978 Professor. There he temporarily headed the physics faculty and was director of the Spaces Sciences Laboratory (SSL) and founding director of the Theoretical Astrophysics Center. In 2015 he became interim vice chancellor for research.

McKee was a Sackler Lecturer at Harvard, Toronto and Tel Aviv and a Bahcall Lecturer in Tel Aviv. He received the Antoinette de Vaucouleurs Medal and gave the associated lecture at the University of Texas.

He was with Joseph Taylor Chairman (2000) of the ten-year Astronomy and Astrophysics Survey Committee of the National Research Council.

He dealt particularly with astrophysical hydrodynamics, interstellar media (shock waves in the interstellar medium, for example from supernovae, three-phase model of the interstellar medium with Jeremiah Ostriker), gas clouds, quasars and active galactic centers, winds from accretion disks and star formation with numerical simulations. With Richard Klein he founded the Berkeley Astrophysical Fluid Dynamics Group.

In 2016 he held the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship . He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences , the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Physical Society . In 1998/99 he was a Guggenheim Fellow and in 1981 a Fairchild Scholar.

Web links

• Homepage in Berkeley

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Dates of birth according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004