Eric Feigelson named Distinguished Senior Scholar

Eric Feigelson, professor of astronomy and astrophysics and of statistics at Penn State University, has been named a Distinguished Senior Scholar. The title is given by Penn State’s Eberly College of Science in recognition of a sustained record of extraordinary achievement in research and education. Holders of this position have had a profound effect on their fields through creative innovation and internationally acclaimed scientific leadership, as well as exceptional accomplishments in teaching and mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students.

Feigelson is a leader in the field of astrostatistics. Throughout his career, he has worked with statisticians to bring advanced methodology to problems in astronomy and astrophysics research. In collaboration with G. Jogesh Babu, professor of statistics at Penn State, Feigelson has organized international conferences for researchers and summer schools for graduate students. Feigelson and Babu also authored a text, Modern Statistical Methods for Astronomy with R Applications, which won the 2012 American Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE) in the cosmology and astronomy category.

Feigelson has made many fundamental contributions in advancing the understanding of star formation through studies at X-ray wavelengths. He led the Chandra Orion Ultradeep Project (COUP) that produced comprehensive data on the X-ray activity of young stars in the Orion Nebula, the nearest star-forming region to Earth located in the constellation Orion. He now is leading the Massive Young Star Forming Complex Study in Infrared and X-ray (MYStIX) project, which traces populations of young stars in massive star-forming nebulae. He is a member of the team that developed the primary instrument for NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory led by Gordon Garmire, Evan Pugh Professor Emeritus of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State.

Feigelson's previous awards and honors include being named an Institute for Scientific Information Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher in Space Sciences in 2009. In 2007, he was a member of NASA's Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Explorer mission that received the American Astronomical Society's Bruno Rossi Prize. Also in 2007, the University Council for Educational Administration recognized Feigelson and Babu with the UCEA Mid-Atlantic Region University Continuing Education Association Award for exemplary non-credit program development for his Summer School in Statistics for Astronomers III. In 1999 and 2000, he received the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Group Achievement and Teamwork Awards as a part of NASA's Swift satellite team. In 1991, he received the Penn State Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Certificate for Distinguished Teaching. In 1984, he received the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award. In 1980, he was part of the Einstein Observatory team that received the NASA Group Achievement Award.

Feigelson has published two hundred peer-reviewed articles on topics ranging from the chemistry of interstellar materials to X-rays from jets produced by massive black holes. With Babu, he has written or edited seven books on astrostatistics. He is the inaugural president of the International Astronomical Union Commission on Astroinformatics and Astrostatistics, co-editor of the online Astrostatistics and Astroinformatics Portal, and serves as Statistical Scientific Editor of the American Astronomical Society journals.

Before joining the Penn State faculty in 1982, Feigelson was a postdoctoral scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. degree in astronomy from Harvard University in 1980 and his bachelor's of science degree in astronomy from Haverford College in 1975.