HARVEY WASHINGTON BANKS

Banks earned his Ph.D. at George Washington University 1961, thus becoming the first African American to earn that degree specifically in astronomy. He then taught at Delaware State College and Howard University. Banks' research interests included determination of orbits, celestial mechanics, high dispersion spectroscopy, and the geodetic determinations from the observations of solar eclipse and satellites.

GIBOR BASRI

Basri received his Ph.D. in astrophysics from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and has been at the University of California, Berkeley since 1982. Basri is probably best known for his research on substellar objects known as "brown dwarfs," which emit so little light they were not detected until 1995 by the team he headed. Basri published an article on the discovery of brown dwarfs in the April 2000 issue Scientific American.

JASON BEST

Best earned his Ph.D. in Astronomy & Astrophysics from the Pennsylvania State University in 1997, taught at Indiana University, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Astrophysics at Shepherd College in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. His specialty is fractal cosmology, using the pointwise dimension (which is based on fractal geometry) to understand both the large-scale structure of the universe and the connection between galaxy morphology and environment.

Suggested Link
Dr. Best's web page

BETH A. BROWN

Brown was born in Roanoke, VA, and received her Ph.D. in Astronomy in 1998 from the University of Michigan, the first African-American woman to have done so. She is employed as an astrophysicist at the National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC), NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center. Her research is currently in the area of the hot interstellar medium in elliptical galaxies, and the mechanisms for X-ray emission from faint elliptical galaxies. Brown also dedicates her time to educational outreach targeting middle and high school students. She has co-authored several articles on the Crab Nebula and X-ray emission from early type galaxies.

Suggested Link
Dr. Brown's web page