1. Cornelis A "Neil" Gehrels was an American astrophysicist specializing in the field of gamma-ray astronomy.
28 Facts About Neil Gehrels
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Neil Gehrels was Chief of the Astroparticle Physics Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center from 1995 until his death, and was best known for his work developing the field from early balloon instruments to today's space observatories such as the NASA Swift mission, for which he was the principal investigator.
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Neil Gehrels was leading the WFIRST wide-field infrared telescope forward toward a launch in the mid-2020s.
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Neil Gehrels was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Neil Gehrels was born in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, on October 3,1952.
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Neil Gehrels grew up near several telescopes including living at McDonald Observatory before his family settled in Tucson, Arizona, when he was 14, where he attended high school and then the University of Arizona as an undergraduate student.
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Neil Gehrels received bachelor's degrees in music and physics from UofA in 1976.
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Neil Gehrels took a postdoctoral position at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in 1981 working with Bonnard J Teegarden.
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Neil Gehrels died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 64 on February 6,2017.
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Neil Gehrels was chief of the Astroparticle Physics Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center starting in 1995.
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Neil Gehrels was the principal investigator for the Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission.
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Neil Gehrels was a professor at the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences at University of Maryland and adjunct professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University.
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Neil Gehrels's research focused on transient objects in the universe such as gamma-ray bursts, supernova and active galaxy flares.
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Neil Gehrels worked to develop gamma-ray astrophysics from a field of experiments detecting a few objects to a full astronomical discipline with thousands of sources in many classes.
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Neil Gehrels was elected chair of the Astronomy Section of the National Academy of Sciences in 2013.
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Neil Gehrels published over 600 academic articles, which have been cited 40,000 times for an h-index of 97.
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Neil Gehrels's most cited works include papers on the discovery of the origin of short gamma-ray bursts, the Swift satellite, Poisson statistics, observations of gamma-ray bursts at the edge of the visible universe, discovery of a relativistic tidal disruption event, and finding of two classes of active galactic nuclei in the gamma-ray band.
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Neil Gehrels worked predominantly in the area of high energy astrophysics, studying explosive objects in the universe such as supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, gravitational wave transients and tidal disruption events.
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Neil Gehrels was a laboratory physicist developing instrumentation for space observation.
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Neil Gehrels first was involved in the proposal to NASA for the instrument, specializing in the design and techniques for background reduction.
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Neil Gehrels was the project scientist for the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory from its launch in 1991 to de-orbit in 2000.
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Neil Gehrels followed Don Kniffen, who was project scientist during the development.
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Neil Gehrels was the principal investigator of the Swift mission and deputy project scientist for the Fermi observatory.
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Neil Gehrels led the Swift proposal, oversaw the development, and was chief scientist of the operations.
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For Fermi, Neil Gehrels worked with lead scientists at Goddard, Stanford, the United States Naval Research Laboratory, and several other institutions to propose the mission and bring it to fruition.
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Neil Gehrels joined the SNAP dark energy mission proposal led by Saul Perlmutter and Michael Levi in 2008.
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Neil Gehrels led the proposal of JDEM to the 2010 Decadal Survey.
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Neil Gehrels was the project scientist and chaired the Formulation Science Working Group with co-chairs Jeremy Kasdin and David Spergel.