Obama to honor Rice alum
Astrophysicist James Gunn earns National Medal of Science

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

When you hear “go deep” this time of year, you’re probably thinking football. But deep has a whole other meaning for James Gunn.

The Princeton astrophysicist who earned his bachelor’s degree in 1961 at Rice University is one of nine people who will be awarded the nation’s highest scientific honor, the National Medal of Science, from President Barack Obama at the White House Oct. 7.

	JAMES GUNN

Gunn is famous among astrophysicists not only for his technical ability at building the mechanisms that let humans peer deeply into the universe, but also for his interpretive powers when he tells the rest of us what he sees out there. In his early work, Gunn helped determine how galaxies form and what fills the space between them, which led to current theories about dark matter.

As an equally adept technician, Gunn spent six years building the digital camera that became key to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which has in subsequent years produced the deepest, most comprehensive map of the night sky. It helped scientists confirm the existence of dark matter.

He also took part in the creation of the Hubble Space Telescope, with which Rice has a rich history. While at Caltech in the 1970s, Gunn was deputy principal investigator on the Hubble’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera. The camera was replaced by astronauts in 1993, but components of the original telescope were refurbished and returned to Hubble this summer.

“I was already pretty determined to be an astrophysicist when I came to Rice, though there was no astrophysics taught there then,” said Gunn, who was born in Livingston, Texas, but moved constantly as his geophysicist father traveled for Gulf Oil.

At Rice, he said, “I did what we (at Princeton) very strongly encourage our entering grad students to do as undergraduates — take all the physics and math you can. The astro stuff comes easily if you have the technical background, but if you waste your time on astro courses early on, that comes at the expense of learning quantum mechanics or statistical mechanics or fluid dynamics or advanced calculus or statistics, all of which you need at your fingertips as soon as you dig into research.

“I was and am very happy with this decision and with my education at Rice; I have never regretted going there and doubt very seriously, having seen the undergraduate programs at a number of other excellent places, that I could have done better somewhere else.”

In any case, stargazing amid the bright city lights of Houston was as much a problem then as it is now, he acknowledged. Not that it mattered. “I was far too busy with courses to even think about stargazing — but if I had done, it would have been cloudy,” he said.

Gunn follows another alumnus to the White House. Dennis Sullivan, who earned his undergraduate degree at Rice in 1963, was honored by President George W. Bush in 2004 for his work on algebraic topology, quantum field theory and string theory. Sullivan holds the Albert Einstein Chair at the
City University of New York Graduate Center and is a professor at Stony
Brook University.