Don Q. Lamb University of Chicago

Don Q. Lamb is the Louis Block Professor of Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Chicago. His current research interests include gamma-ray bursts, supernovae, and galaxy clusters. He is the author of more than 300 papers, and the co-editor of several books on theoretical astrophysics. He has made seminal contributions to stellar structure and evolution, especially the structure and evolution of white dwarfs and neutron stars, to compact X-ray sources, especially magnetic white dwarfs and X-ray burst sources, to gamma-ray bursts, especially their use as probes of cosmology and the very high redshift universe, and to Type Ia supernovae, especially turbulent thermonuclear burning and discovery of the `gravitationally confined detonation" explosion mechanism. He has developed powerful statistical methods based on Bayesian inference, and applied them to a variety of astrophysical problems. He helped found the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. He is Mission Scientist for the High Energy Transient Explorer-2 and a Swift Associate Scientist. He is also Director of the DOE NNSA ASC/Alliance Flash Center at the University of Chicago. He has been awarded a Marshall Scholarship and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.