Education: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1971-1974, BS
University of California, Santa Cruz, 1974-1975
University of Chicago, 1975-1976, MA
University of Washington, 1996-2000, MS, Ph. D.
Kevin Krisciunas has been teaching introductory astronomy off and on since 1978. He grew up as an amateur astronomer and studied astronomy and
physics in college. From 1977 to 1982
he worked for a NASA contractor and flew
160 flights aboard NASA's Kuiper Airborne Observatory, which was a four engine jet that operated a 36-inch diameter telescope at altitudes as high as 45,000 feet. From 1982 to 1996 he worked for the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope, which is situated at the 13,800 foot summit of Mauna Kea on the Island of Hawaii. Since 1999 his research has primarily involved optical and infrared observations of Type Ia supernovae.
These objects have been used to demonstrate that the universe is not
just expanding, but that the universe is
accelerating in its expansion. He is
a participant in the ESSENCE project, which is well on its way to discovering 200 high-redshift supernovae using the
4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. The ESSENCE team uses the world's largest ground based telescopes (Keck in Hawaii, the
Very Large Telescope and Magellan
telescopes in Chile, the Gemini telescopes in Hawaii and Chile), plus the Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope.
From 2001 to 2003 Krisciunas worked in Chile at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory and Las Campanas Observatory. From 2004 through 2006 he was a postdoctoral researcher and research assistant professor at the
University of Notre Dame.
While working at the Joint Astronomy Centre in Hilo, Hawaii, he was their
de facto publicity officer. He has a strong interest in communicating the excitement of scientific discoveries to
the general public.
