John Mather

Born on 7 August 1946 in Roanoke, Virginia, John C. Mather is a Nobel Prize–winning astrophysicist and cosmologist. Mather grew up on a research farm operated by Rutgers University in rural New Jersey. He showed an early affinity for science, entering school science fairs and building telescopes and shortwave radios from mail-order kits. Because of its physics program, he chose to attend Swarthmore College, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1968 and an NSF scholarship to attend graduate school. After working a summer job at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, he decided to go to the University of California, Berkeley. For his doctoral thesis, Mather worked on a system to measure the temperature variations in the recently discovered cosmic microwave background radiation. Following a postdoc in radio astronomy at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Mather accepted a position in 1976 at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, where he continued his CMB research, serving as study scientist on the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite project launched in 1989. The measurements provided by COBE helped advance Big Bang cosmology and our understanding of density variations in the early universe. For his work on COBE, Mather shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics with colleague George Smoot. Most recently, Mather has served as senior project scientist on the James Webb Space Telescope, set to launch in 2021. (Photo credit: NASA/GSFC/Pat Izzo)

Date in History: 7 August 1946