Background
McCullough, Peter Rankin was born on August 20, 1964 in Providence. Son of James Rankin McCullough and Coyla Carolyn Bell.
McCullough, Peter Rankin was born on August 20, 1964 in Providence. Son of James Rankin McCullough and Coyla Carolyn Bell.
McCullough attended public primary schools in Massachusetts and North Carolina. In summers between his undergraduate years, he interned at the Wind River National Outdoor Leadership School, the Palo Alto California police department, Weyerhauser, and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory"s Very Large Array. McCullough received a Bachelor of Science in physics in 1986 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
At the University of California, Berkeley, he earned a Doctor of Philosophy in astrophysics in 1993.
Soon after the United States. declassification of the laser beacon adaptive optics technique in 1991, he identified dusty disks around newborn stars, later referred to as proplyds, in observations of the Orion Nebula made with the Starfire Optical Range. Astronomers John Gaustad, McCullough, and David Van Buren with engineer Wayne Rosing mapped the entire southern sky in the hydrogen alpha transition with sufficient sensitivity for decontamination of the Milky Way from the cosmic microwave background. McCullough"s modification to the Stromgren sphere model often produces more realistic results than the original.
Education Employment McCullough was a Hubble postdoctoral fellow, and then an assistant professor in the Astronomy Department of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Since 2002 he has been employed by the Space Telescope Science Institute. He also works on the science team of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite.
In 2009-2010 he was a visiting scientist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Institute d"Astrophysique in Paris.
Member American Astronomical Society, Astronomical Society of the Pacific.
Married Margaret Meixner. 1 child, Lisa.