John Mather, PhD

John Mather is an astrophysicist, cosmologist, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the Cosmic Background Explorer Satellite (COBE), which measured the black body form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation.

Mather’s work helped cement the big-bang theory of the universe. According to the Nobel Prize committee, “the COBE-project can also be regarded as the starting point for cosmology as a precision science.”

Mather is a senior astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and adjunct professor of physics at the University of Maryland, College Park. Dr. Mather is also the project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope, the largest, most powerful, and complex space telescope ever built and launched into space.

He received a bachelor’s degree in physics from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania as well as a doctorate in physics from the University of California, Berkeley.