Background
John Hawley was born in 1958 in Annapolis, Maryland.
Astronomer astrophysicist university professor
John Hawley was born in 1958 in Annapolis, Maryland.
He is the younger brother of former astronaut Steven A. Hawley and graduated from Central High School in Salina, Kansas. He received his Doctor of Philosophy in astronomy from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1984.
Hawley is a graduate of Haverford College. He then joined the faculty of the University of Virginia in 1987 as an assistant professor He was promoted to full professor in 1999 and was chair of the Department of Astronomy from 2006 to 2012.
According to the Shaw selection committee the "discovery and elucidation of the magnetorotational instability (Medical Research Institute)" solved the previously "elusive" problem of accretion, a widespread phenomenon in astrophysics and "provides what to this day remains the only viable mechanism for the outward transfer of angular momentum in accretion disks".
The Shaw Prize ceremony was held September 23 in Hong Kong. "I started looking for the Nigerian return address and a request for my bank account number," he later joked.
In 2013, he shared the Shaw Prize for Astronomy with Steven Balbus. Hawley was a Bantrell Prize Fellow in Theoretical Astrophysics at the California Institute of Technology from 1984 to 1987. As of 2015, Hawley is the Associate Dean for the Sciences in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Hawley was the 1993 recipient of the Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy of the American Astronomical Society. When Hawley learned of the Shaw Prize via email, he thought it was a scam.
