Mitchell C. Begelman

Mitchell C. Begelman is a Distinguished Professor and former chair of the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU). He is also a Fellow of JILA, a physical sciences institute operated jointly by the University of Colorado and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. He earned A.B. and A.M. degrees in Physics from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in Theoretical Astrophysics from the University of Cambridge, and held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Cambridge, before joining the CU faculty in 1982. Dr. Begelman’s research focuses on the theory of astrophysical fluids and plasmas, particularly in the high-energy environments of accreting black holes. His academic honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Helen B. Warner Prize of the American Astronomical Society, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, and visiting fellowships at Trinity College and Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge. In addition to numerous research articles he has published two astrophysics books intended for a general audience, Turn Right at Orion: Travels Through the Cosmos and Gravity’s Fatal Attraction: Black Holes in the Universe (with Martin Rees), which won the 1996 American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award and is now in its third edition.