Anne Kinney, who most recently served as director of the Solar System Exploration Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, has been appointed W. M. Keck Observatory chief scientist. The appointment is effective Aug. 3.
Kinney comes to Keck Observatory from NASA, where she was most recently the director of the Solar System Exploration Division at Goddard Space Flight Center. Kinney, who holds a PhD from New York University in Physics and Astronomy, brings more than 30 years of scientific research and organizational leadership experience. She has been a member of the Keck’s Science Steering Committee since 2012.
Prior to her service at Goddard, Kinney was the director of the Universe Division in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, with a portfolio including Hubble Space Telescope, Chandra X-ray Observatory, Spitzer Space Telescope, SOFIA and Fermi.
Kinney is an expert in extragalactic astronomy and has published 80 papers in refereed journals on quasars, blazars, active galaxies and normal galaxies, and signatures of accretion disks in active galaxies. She has demonstrated that accretion disks in the center of active galaxies lie at random angles relative to their host galaxies.
Kinney received the Presidential Rank Award in 2012, has received two Exceptional Leadership Awards at NASA, and was a visiting scholar at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge.
“We are delighted to welcome Anne as the Chief Scientist of Keck Observatory,” observatory Director Hilton Lewis said in a prepared statement. “In this new role, she will be responsible for stewardship of the observatory’s scientific programs and for ensuring the health and vibrancy of the science conducted at this observatory.”
The W. M. Keck Observatory operates two, 10-meter optical/infrared telescopes near the summit of Mauna Kea that feature a suite of advanced instruments including imagers, multi-object spectrographs, high-resolution spectrographs, integral-field spectrographs and world-leading laser guide star adaptive optics systems.
Keck Observatory is a private 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and a scientific partnership of the California Institute of Technology, the University of California and NASA.