Background
Judith Pipher was born in 1940 in Toronto.
astrophysicist university professor
Judith Pipher was born in 1940 in Toronto.
She graduated from Leaside High School in 1958 and earned a Bachelor of Arts in astronomy from the University of Toronto in 1962. Following her graduation, Pipher moved to the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York where she taught science and attended Cornell University.
She is Professor Emeritus of Astronomy at the University of Rochester and directed the C.E.K. Mees Observatory from 1979 to 1994. She has made important contributions to the development of infrared detector arrays in space telescopes. In the late 1960s, she worked as a graduate student of Martin Harwit on a cryogenic rocket telescope experiment.
She received her Doctor of Philosophy from Cornell in 1971.
Her dissertation, "Rocket Submillimeter Observations of the Galaxy and Background," led her into research in the nascent fields of submillimeter and infrared astronomy. Pipher joined the faculty of the University of Rochester"s Physics and Astronomy Department in 1971 as an Instructor.
From 1979 to 1994 Pipher was director of University of Rochester"s C.E.K. Mees Observatory. In the 1970s and 1980s, she made observations from the Kuiper Airborne Observatory.
They reported their results in 1983.
That year Pipher and her colleagues were among the first to use an infrared array camera to capture starburst galaxies. The Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) for the Spitzer Space Telescope was launched in August 2003. She has also worked with Dan Watson and on the development of mercury cadmium telluride (HgCdTe) arrays.
Pipher"s observational research has concentrated on star formation studies and the arrays she designed have been used to observe astronomical phenomena such as planetary nebulae, brown dwarfs, and the Galactic Center.
She has authored over 200 papers and scientific articles The sensor improves the ability to detect potentially hazardous objects such as asteroids.
Pipher is a member of a team at the University of Rochester that developed the NEOCam sensor, a HgCdTe infrared-light sensor intended for the proposed Near-Earth Object Camera.