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Christopher McKee
University of California, Berkeley
Vice President
Biographical Summary
Christopher McKee is a professor of Physics and of Astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his AB in Physics from Harvard in 1963 and his PhD in Physics from Berkeley in 1970. After a year as a postdoctoral fellow in theoretical astrophysics at Caltech,he became an assistant professor of astronomy at Harvard. In 1974 he joined the Physics and Astronomy Departments at Berkeley. He was instrumental in establishing the Theoretical Astrophysics Center at Berkeley and served as its first director in 1985. Shortly thereafter, he relinquished that position to become Director of the Space Sciences Laboratory at Berkeley, a position he held until 1998. He was Chair of the Physics Department from 2000-2004. Subsequently, he served on and chaired the committee that oversees all academic hiring and promotions on the Berkeley campus. For many years he was a consultant at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He has served on numerous advisory committees for NASA and NSF. For the National Academies, he co-chaired the 2000 decadal survey of astronomy and astrophysics with Joseph Taylor. He has also served on other Academy committees, including the Board on Physics and Astronomy. He has served as an Associate Editor of Reviews of Modern Physics and is on the editorial board of the Annual Reviews of Astronomy and Astrophysics. He is currently the chair of the Rahman Prize Committee for the APS.
McKee is a theoretical astrophysicist with a broad range of interests. Much of his work has focused on the dynamics and thermal physics of astrophysical plasmas, with applications to shock waves in molecular gas, to supernova remnants and to the relativistic blast waves believed to power cosmic gamma ray bursts, among others. In collaboration with J.P. Ostriker, he developed the three-phase model of the interstellar medium, which has been widely used to organize and interpret observational data. More recently, he has used both analytic techniques and large-scale numerical simulation to study the process of star formation, one of the central problems in contemporary astrophysics.
McKee is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was a Hertz Foundation Fellow, a Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar,a Guggenheim Fellow, a Miller Fellow, a Sackler Lecturer at both the University of Toronto and Tel Aviv University, and a recipient of the Antoinette de Vaucouleurs Medal (University of Texas)..
Candidate's Statement
Physics addresses the big questions--what is the origin of the universe, the stars, planets, even of life itself, and what is their fate? In recent decades, physicists have developed the instruments and techniques that permit us to explore these big questions and the theoretical advances that enlarge our understanding of the fundamental properties of matter and energy. We are now able to manipulate matter on the atomic scale, to explore the full implications of quantum mechanics and to advance our understanding of complex systems, including living ones. With the advent of the Large Hadron Collider, the next decade will see even more exciting discoveries about the structure of matter. In my own field of astrophysics, advances in both ground-based and space-based telescopes are enabling us to push into the "dark ages" between the recombination and the reionization of the universe, as well as to study phenomena ranging from extrasolar planets to black holes in unprecedented detail. The technologies developed by physicists are also extremely practical and are transforming our world.
To continue this extraordinary progress in physics, we need the support of Congress and its constituents. One of the core missions of the APS is to work with our sister scientific societies to create a nation that is scientifically literate and that encourages youngsters to pursue careers in science. At the college level, we have many outstanding instructors, but the number of science instructors at the K-12 level who even know physics is woefully small. Without better education at the primary and secondary level, the public will lose interest in the goals of physics and fail to understand its many contributions to modern technology. There is bipartisan support for strengthening our education system, and the APS should support improving science education in general and physics education in particular. To ensure a healthy funding environment for science, we need to publicize new discoveries and their implications for the public good. We should also make the public aware of the significant contributions of foreign students and scientists to American science with the goal of making it easier for them to enter the country.
The most immediate impacts of the APS on its members are the journals it operates and the meetings it runs. The APS is justifiably proud of the high quality of its journals and its meetings, and it should continue to utilize the latest technologies to maintain and enhance this high quality. The Society provides other valuable services as well. When I was chair of the Physics Department at Berkeley, I took advantage of two of these: I attended meetings of Physics Department chairs organized by the APS, and I sent newly hired assistant professors to annual orientation meetings held for new physics faculty nationwide. The Society should continue to provide these kinds of valuable services to its members.
