Two astrophysicists appointed to Argonne Lab, Flash Center

Two astrophysicists have accepted appointments to new posts at Argonne National Laboratory and at the University’s Center for Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flashes.

Argonne has appointed Robert Rosner, the William Wrather Distinguished Service Professor in Astronomy & Astrophysics and the College, as Associate Laboratory Director for Physical, Biological and Computing Sciences. Don Lamb, Professor in Astronomy & Astrophysics and the College, succeeds Rosner as Director of the Flash Center.

Rosner will continue to serve as Argonne’s Chief Scientist, a position he has held since April. As Chief Scientist, Rosner oversees the laboratory’s scientific programs and research planning activities while fostering collaborative relationships with the University, which operates Argonne for the U.S. Department of Energy.

He also will retain his Chicago faculty appointment and will serve as Associate Director of the Flash Center. As Associate Laboratory Director, Rosner will determine the future direction of programs, serve as the primary contact with the U.S. Department of Energy and manage the employees who work in Argonne’s nine divisions of Physical, Biological and Computing Sciences.

Rosner specializes in plasma astrophysics, and he has been instrumental in establishing Chicago as one of the world’s leading centers in the field. Before joining the Chicago faculty in 1987, he was a member of the Harvard University faculty and an astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

Lamb has focused his research on fundamental, unsolved problems in high-energy astrophysics, specifically studying X-ray bursts. He is a member of the science team of NASA’s High Energy Transient Explorer-2 satellite. Launched in 2000, HETE-2 detects gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the universe.

In 1999, one of Lamb’s students, Daniel Reichart (Ph.D.,’00), discovered evidence that links gamma-ray bursts to the collapse of massive stars. He and Reichart, now at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, have since shown that if gamma-ray bursts are indeed related to the collapse of massive stars, they can tell scientists many things about the universe when it was only 100 million years old.

Before joining the Chicago faculty in 1985, Lamb taught at the University of Illinois and Harvard University and served as a physicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.