"The Exploration of the Pluto System by New Horizons"

Dr. Alan Stern (Southwest Research Institute)

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Dr. Alan Stern is the Associate Vice President of the Space Science and Engineering Division of the Southwest Research Institute. For the past 14 years, he has also served as the Principal Investigator for NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto; he is widely regarded as the driving force behind making the mission. The New Horizons probe is the first mission to explore Pluto and its system of satellites; afterwards, it will fly on to explore the Solar System beyond Pluto.

Dr. Stern is highly qualified to be leading this mission: his research focuses on studies of objects in our Solar System beyond Neptune (the “Kuiper Belt” and “Oort Cloud”), the satellites of the outer planets, and the atmospheres of moons in the solar system, among many other topics. He earned his doctorate in astrophysics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and holds master of science degrees in atmospheric science and aerospace engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. Besides his work on New Horizons, he has developed eight other scientific instruments for near-Earth and planetary research missions.

He has been honored as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, and was named in 2007 as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world. Most recently, he was named an honorary Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and selected to receive the Smithsonian’s 2015 American Ingenuity Award.