JOHN C. MATHER is an astrophysicist, cosmologist and Nobel laureate in Physics for his work on the Cosmic Background Explorer Satellite (COBE) with George Smoot. This work helped cement the Big Bang theory of the universe. According to the Nobel Prize committee, "the COBE-project can also be regarded as the starting point forcosmology as a precision science." Mather is also the project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a space telescope to be launched to L2 no earlier than 2018.
Dr. Mather is a Senior Astrophysicist in the Observational Cosmology Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. As an NRC postdoctoral fellow at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (New York City), he led the proposal efforts for the Cosmic Background Explorer (74-76), and came to GSFC to be the Study Scientist (76-88), Project Scientist (88-98), and also the Principal Investigator for the Far IR Absolute Spectrophotometer (FIRAS) on COBE. He showed that the cosmic microwave background radiation has a blackbody spectrum within 50 ppm. As Senior Project Scientist (95-present) for the James Webb Space Telescope, he leads the science team, and represents scientific interests within the project management. He has served on advisory and working groups for the National Academy of Sciences, NASA, and the NSF (for the ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, and for the CARA, the Center for Astrophysical Research in the Antarctic). He is coauthor (with John Boslough) of The Very First Light: The True Inside Story of the Scientific Journey Back to the Dawn of the Universe.
