
Congratulations Robert C. Kennicutt, Jr., Professor of Astronomy, University of Arizona; Executive Director of the Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy, Texas A&M, for winning the 2019 National Academy of Sciences Award for Scientific Reviewing, sponsored by us!
Kennicutt’s influential 1998 review paper, “Star Formation in Galaxies Along the Hubble Sequence,” has become one of the most-cited papers in astrophysics. The paper (PDF freely available to download here) synthesized a broad review of stellar formation, proving a critical intellectual foundation for the field, and also gave birth to two new fields of investigation: the characterization of tracers of star formation rates and the study of the connection between gas and star formation in galaxies.
Kennicutt is also known for the Kennicutt–Schmidt law, which defines a relation between the gas density and star formation rate in a given region, and for his role in constraining the value of the Hubble constant, the unit of measurement that astronomers and astrophysicists use to describe the expansion of the universe. He served as co-leader of the scientific team that definitively measured the expansion of the universe, and continues to research new methods to characterize the evolution of nearby and distant galaxies.
The award will be presented on Sunday, April 28 at 2:00pm in Washington, D.C., at the NAS Annual Meeting. More information on all the NAS 2019 Award recipients can be found here.