Astronomer Judith Pipher Named to National Women's Hall of Fame

Judith Pipher, PhD, professor emeritus of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester in Rochester, N.Y., will be inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, N.Y., for her research and teaching achievements in the field of infrared (IR) astronomy. The induction ceremony will take place on Oct. 6 and 7, 2007. Pipher has been a member of the university faculty since 1971, shortly after earning her doctorate from Cornell University. "When I entered the field 40 years ago, roughly 12 percent of the scientists were women, and the percentage is about the same now," said Pipher. "The good news, though, is that we are starting to see a larger percentage of women in our undergraduate classes. But we have to translate this to the next level -- women getting doctorates in astronomy, too." Pipher was one of the first US astronomers to turn an infrared array toward the skies. In 1983, she and her colleagues used a prototype detector to take the first telescopic IR pictures of the moon. She has since been involved in developing near-IR detector arrays, and helped design the IR detectors on the Spitzer Space Telescope, launched by NASA in 2003. She uses the instrument to investigate clusters of forming stars and brown dwarfs and massive planet-like objects too small to become stars but too dark to be seen by ground-based telescopes.