Member of the Graduate Faculty | Professor, Astronomy | Astronomer, Steward Observatory | Distinguished Professor
Chris Impey is a University Distinguished Professor. For 17 years he was Deputy Head of the Astronomy Department at the University of Arizona, and he is currently Associate Dean of the College of Science. He has over 180 refereed publications and 60 conference proceedings, and his work has been supported by 20 million in grants from NASA and the NSF. As a professor, he has won eleven teaching awards, and has been heavily involved in curriculum and instructional technology development. Chris Impey is a past Vice President of the American Astronomical Society. He 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 a co-chair of the Education and Public Outreach Study Groufor the recent Decadal Survey of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2009, he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and in 2014 he was selected as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor. Chris Impey aims to convey the excitement of astronomy in as many ways as possible to a large public audience. He gives 20 public talks a year, to audiences as large as 4000 and as varied as NASA engineers, first-graders, and Buddhist monks. He has written over forty popular articles on cosmology and astrobiology and authored two introductory textbooks. His has published seven popular science books: The Living Cosmos 2007, Random House) How It Ends 2010, Norton) How It Began 2012, Norton) Talking About Life 2010, Cambridge) Dreams of Other Worlds 2013, Princeton) Humble Before the Void 2014, Templeton) and Beyond 2015, Norton) His first novel, Shadow World, was published in 2013. His Teach Astronomy web site has over 5000 visitors a week, and his YouTube lectures and videos have over half a million views. He is currently teaching two Massive Open Online Classes MOOCs) to over 70,000 people, most of them living outside the United States.