Giovanni Fazio

Giovanni Gene Fazio (born May 26, 1933 in San Antonio (Texas) ) is an American astrophysicist.

Fazio graduated from St. Mary's University in Texas with a bachelor's degree in physics and chemistry in 1954 and received a PhD in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1959 with a dissertation in elementary particle physics. He was then an assistant professor at the University of Rochester and from 1962 at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics , from 1983 as a senior physicist. He was also a lecturer at Harvard University.

He deals with infrared and gamma ray astronomy. He was Principal Scientist on the Spacelab 2 infrared telescope (1985) and was involved in many NASA balloon experiments.

At the University of Rochester he was a pioneer in gamma ray astronomy with balloons in the late 1950s and one of the principal investigators of the gamma ray detector at NASA's Orbiting Solar Observatory (1962). He continued that at the Smithsonian Center. He was one of the initiators of the 10 m reflector at the FL Whipple Observatory in Arizona to search for high-energy gamma-ray sources. In the early 1970s he was a pioneer for balloon telescopes in the far infrared and for twenty years Principal Investigator for the 1 m balloon telescope in the far infrared. In 1998 he was co-investigator for the Submillimeter Wave Astronomical Satellite (SWAS).

In 2015 he held the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship . He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society , the Royal Astronomical Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science . He has received six Group Achievement Awards from NASA and he received the Russian Tsiolkovsky Medal (1998), the Smithsonian Distinguished Scholar Award, and the Royal Society's COSPAR Massey Award (2008).

Web links

• Homepage at the Harvard Smithsonian Center

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Birth and career dates for American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004