In 1976, the university celebrated its 100th birthday with a year of parties, dinners, and parades, and a centennial symposium that brought scholars from all over the world to Hopkins. The century of achievement was also commemorated by the establishment of two Alumni Centennial Professorships in the School of Arts and Sciences.
Return
to All Schools
Alumni Centennial Professorship (Honorary)
Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences
Physics and Astronomy
Established in 1976 by the University at its Centennial to honor Johns Hopkins alumni
Held by Charles Bennett
CHARLES BENNETT is one of the world’s leaders in the study of the cosmic microwave background radiation that fills the universe. A professor at Johns Hopkins since 2005, he has brought numerous accolades to the Department of Physics and Astronomy in his time here, including being elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2005 and receiving the National Academy of Sciences’ Henry Draper Medal in 2005, the Harvey Prize in 2006, the Comstock Prize in Physics in 2009, and the 2010 Shaw Prize in Astronomy (co-winner). In 2012 he and his Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) team won the Gruber Cosmology Prize.
Bennett focuses on designing and building novel instruments to observe the cosmic microwave background, which is the faint afterglow of energy from the infant universe. His WMAP project provided spectacular results, revealing the universe’s precise shape, age and composition for the first time, as well as the existence of the cosmic neutrino background and the timing of the formation of the generation of stars.
Held by Rosemary F.G. Wyse
ROSEMARY F. G. WYSE graduated from Queen Mary College, University of London, with a BSc (1st class honors) in Physics with Astrophysics. She then moved to Cambridge University (Emmanuel College), where she obtained a distinction in Part III of the Applied Mathematics Tripos, followed by her PhD at the Institute of Astronomy. Wyse moved to the U.S. to undertake postdoctoral research, primarily at the University of California, Berkeley. She joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins University in 1988. Her research focus is in the field of galaxy formation and evolution, with emphases on resolved stellar populations and the nature of dark matter. She received the 2016 Dirk Brouwer Career Award from the Division of Dynamical Astronomy of the American Astronomical Society.