Neil Gehrels

Chief of the Astroparticle Physics Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Gehrels received his PhD in physics from Caltech.  Through his scientific and mission leadership, Gehrels has transformed gamma-ray astronomy from a field of experimental search and few detections to an astronomical discipline with thousand of sources.  He has led major space missions in this field.  These are the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory as Project Scientist and Swift as Principal Investigator.  In addition, he played significant rolls in the other current gamma-ray space missions:  INTEGRAL as the US Mission Scientist and Fermi as a Deputy Project Scientist.   All of these are multinational missions.  For the Swift mission, he has led the mission from conception and bringing together partners in the US, Italy and UK, through construction and operation to scientific discovery.  The observatory has produced a huge outpouring of new findings in time domain astrophysics and sky surveys.  He is currently the Project Scientist for NASA's Wide-Field InfraRed Survey Telescope (WFIRST) mission, the top rank large space mission in the 2010 Decadal Survey of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Gehrels is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Astronomical Society.