Chris Impey is a university distinguished professor and deputy head of the department at the University of Arizona, in charge of academic programs, where he runs the nation’s largest undergraduate majors program in astronomy and the second largest PhD program. His research is on observational cosmology, gravitational lensing, and the evolution and structure of galaxies. Impey has over one-hundred seventy refereed publications, has written over forty popular articles on cosmology and astrobiology, and authored two introductory textbooks and four popular science books: The Living Cosmos, How It Ends, How It Began, and Dreams of Other Worlds.
Impey has served as the vice president of the American Astronomical Society, and has also been an NSF distinguished teaching scholar, a Phi Beta Kappa visiting scholar, and the Carnegie Council on Teaching’s Arizona Professor of the Year. He was co-chair of the Education and Public Outreach Study Group for the Astronomy Decadal Survey of the National Academy of Sciences, and was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2009.
