John C. Mather

John C. Mather, is a Senior Astrophysicist in the Observational Cosmology Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and a Nobel laureate in Physics. His research centers on infrared astronomy and cosmology. As a Nuclear Regulatory Commission postdoctoral fellow at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (New York City), he led the proposal efforts for the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) (1974-76). At GSFC he also served as a study scientist (1976-88) and project scientist (1988-98) and was a principal investigator for the Far IR Absolute Spectrophotometer (FIRAS) on COBE.

As senior project scientist (1995-present) for the James Webb Space Telescope, he leads the science team, and represents scientific interests within the project management. He has served on advisory and working groups for the National Academy of Sciences, NASA, and the National Science Foundation (for the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, and for the Center for Astrophysical Research in the Antarctic. He has received many awards, including the Nobel Prize in Physics for his precise measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation using the COBE satellite.