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Donald G. York

Donald G. York

Don York is Horace B. Horton Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago and a member of the Enrico Fermi Institute. An observational cosmologist, he has focused much of his research on the gas and dust between galaxies for the clues they provide to the formation and evolution of the universe. He was the founding director of the Apache Point Observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico, serving for fourteen years, and of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, one of the most ambitious collaborative projects ever undertaken by astronomers.

He was Harlow Shapley Lecturer of the American Astronomical Society, lecturing at small colleges across America on cosmology and on science and religion. He is the author of some 330 scientific papers. Professor York is founding director of the Apache Point Observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico, and of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. He is also the founder and co-director of a project to create a sustainable technology culture in 26 inner city Chicago schools, known as the Chicago Public Schools/University of Chicago Internet Project (CUIP). He is on the Board of Advisors at the Templeton Foundation.

Recently, Prof. York has been in charge of a Templeton Foundation "Big Questions" project for Chinese scientists, "New Vision 400: Engaging Big Questions in Astronomy and Cosmology Four Hundred Years after the Invention of the Telescope”, for which he led a major conference in Beijing in October, 2008.

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