June 12, 2006
Astronomer Sandra Faber awarded Harvard
Centennial Medal, elected to Harvard Board of Overseers
By Tim Stephens
Sandra Faber, University Professor of astronomy and astrophysics
at UCSC, has been awarded the Centennial Medal of the Harvard
University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS). The
Centennial Medal, first awarded in 1989 on the 100th anniversary
of the GSAS, honors alumni for contributions to society that
have emerged from their graduate education at Harvard. Faber
is one of four Harvard alumni who received the medal this year
at a ceremony on June 7.
Faber has also been elected to serve on the Harvard Board of
Overseers. With 30 members, the board is the larger of Harvard's
two governing boards, the other being the President and Fellows
of Harvard College (also known as the Harvard Corporation).
Members of the Board of Overseers are elected annually by holders
of Harvard degrees. Typically, five new members are elected
each year to six-year terms. The overseers are responsible for
visiting Harvard's schools and departments in order to assess
the quality of their programs and recommend improvements, for
consenting to certain acts of the corporation, and for providing
advice and counsel to the university on a wide range of issues
important to Harvard's future.
Faber attended Swarthmore College as an undergraduate, earning
a B.A. in physics, and earned her Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard
in 1972. She did much of her dissertation research at the Carnegie
Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism in Washington,
Faber has conducted pioneering research on the formation and
evolution of galaxies and the evolution of structure in the
universe. Important concepts in cosmology such as "cold
dark matter" and the "Great Attractor" are direct
results of work by Faber and her colleagues.
She is also a leading authority on telescopes and astronomical
instrumentation. Faber has been closely involved with both the
Hubble Space Telescope and the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.
She led the design and construction of a powerful spectrograph
for the Keck II Telescope called DEIMOS, which she and her collaborators
are now using to conduct a large-scale survey of distant galaxies.
Faber's many honors include Harvard University's Bok Prize,
the Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics, and election to
the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. She joined
the faculty of UC Santa Cruz and the UC Observatories/Lick Observatory
in 1972. In 1995, she was appointed University Professor, the
highest honor for faculty in the UC system.