Steven M. Kahn

Steven M. Kahn is the Dean of Mathematical and Physical Sciences and a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to taking up this current position, he was the Cassius Lamb Kirk Professor in the Natural Sciences at Stanford University (2003-2022), the I.I. Rabi Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Columbia University (1995-2003), and a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Berkeley (1984-1995). He received his A.B. degree summa cum laude from Columbia in 1975, his Ph.D. in Physics from Berkeley in 1980, and was a Center Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics from 1980-82. Kahn is an experimental astrophysicist and cosmologist. He began his career working in X-ray astronomy, where he pioneered the development of high-resolution X-ray spectroscopy of cosmic sources, and the relevant atomic physics. Kahn was the U.S. Principal Investigator on the Reflection Grating Spectrometer experiment which was launched on the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton Observatory in December 1999. With his move to Stanford in 2003, Kahn switched his attention to experimental cosmology where he played an early crucial role in the design and development of the ground-based Vera C. Rubin Observatory and served as director of the project from 2013 through 2022. Kahn is an elected Member of the National Academy of Sciences, and an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society.