Claire E. Max
University of California, Santa Cruz
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Primary Section: 12, Astronomy Secondary Section: 13, Physics Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2008)
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Biosketch
Claire Max is the Bachmann Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she is Director of the University of California Observatories. She graduated from Radcliffe College (A.B.) and Princeton University (Ph.D.), and was a postdoc at UC Berkeley. Dr. Max was a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for many years, where she was the founding director LLNL's branch of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics. At UC Santa Cruz she was a founder and Director of the Center for Adaptive Optics, an NSF Science and Technology Center. Dr. Max is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the California Academy of Sciences. She was recipient of the Ernest O. Lawrence Award in Physics by the US Department of Energy in 2004, the James Madison Medal of Princeton University in 2009, and the American Astronomical Society's Joseph Weber Award for Instrumentation in 2016. She is a Legacy Fellow of the American Astronomical Society, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the SPIE, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Research Interests
Dr. Max's current research interests include adaptive optics, laser guide stars, and their use for studies of nearby galaxy mergers and active galactic nuclei.
