Don Q. Lamb

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.