John E. Carlstrom (born 1957) is an American astrophysicist, and Professor, Departments of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and Physics, at the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, or UChi) is a Private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Its main campus is in the Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, Chic ...

. He graduated from

Vassar College Vassar College ( ) is a private liberal arts college in Poughkeepsie, New York, United States. Founded in 1861 by Matthew Vassar, it was the second degree-granting institution of higher education for women in the United States. The college be ...

with an A.B. in 1981, and from the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

with a Ph.D. in 1988. Carlstrom specializes in measurements of the

Cosmic Microwave Background The cosmic microwave background (CMB, CMBR), or relic radiation, is microwave radiation that fills all space in the observable universe. With a standard optical telescope, the background space between stars and galaxies is almost completely dar ...

, and has led several experiments, including the

Degree Angular Scale Interferometer The Degree Angular Scale Interferometer (DASI) was a telescope installed at the U.S. National Science Foundation's Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica. It was a 13-element interferometer operating between 26 and 36 GHz ( Ka b ...

, the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Array, and the South Pole Telescope. He is also known for manufacturing the Gunn oscillators used at several millimeter and submillimeter observatories, such as the BIMA array, the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory and the

James Clerk Maxwell Telescope The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) is a submillimetre-wavelength radio telescope at Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii, US. The telescope is near the summit of Mauna Kea at . Its primary mirror is 15 metres (16.4 yards) across: it is the la ...

. These oscillators produced the

local oscillator In electronics, the term local oscillator (LO) refers to an electronic oscillator when used in conjunction with a Frequency mixer, mixer to change the frequency of a signal. This frequency conversion process, also called Heterodyne, heterodyning ...

signal for the observatorys'

heterodyne A heterodyne is a signal frequency that is created by combining or mixing two other frequencies using a signal processing technique called ''heterodyning'', which was invented by Canadian inventor-engineer Reginald Fessenden. Heterodyning is us ...

receivers.

Awards

* 1998

MacArthur Fellows Program The MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship and colloquially called the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the MacArthur Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to typically between 20 and ...

* 2004 Magellanic Gold Medal * 2006 Beatrice M. Tinsley Prize * 2015 Gruber Prize in Cosmology * 2020 Elected a Legacy Fellow of the

American Astronomical Society The American Astronomical Society (AAS, sometimes spoken as "double-A-S") is an American society of professional astronomers and other interested individuals, headquartered in Washington, DC. The primary objective of the AAS is to promote the adv ...

References

External links

John E. Carlstrom"
, ''Scientific Commons'' 1957 births Living people 21st-century American astronomers American astrophysicists University of Chicago faculty Vassar College alumni University of California, Berkeley alumni MacArthur Fellows Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Fellows of the American Physical Society Fellows of the American Astronomical Society 20th-century American astronomers {{US-astronomer-stub