BIO-BRIEF: Dr. Douglas Duncan

Director of Astronomical Laboratories, Univ. of Colorado

Education: B.S. (with honor): California Institute of Technology --- Astronomy

Ph. D. University of California Santa Cruz /Lick Observatory --- Astrophysics

Dr. Douglas Duncan comes to CU from the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics of the University of Chicago and Chicago’s Adler Planetarium, where he helped begin a trend of modernizing planetariums which has spread to New York, Denver, and beyond. He also served as national Education Coordinator for the American Astronomical Society, the society which represents the 6,000 professional astronomers in the US. In that capacity he led efforts for better teaching and public communication for astronomers throughout the United States. Dr. Duncan has also been an astronomer on the staff of the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. There he was responsible for one of the Hubble Space Telescope’s original instruments. He and his research team currently study the composition of the oldest known stars - "fossil stars" - which date back almost to the time of the Big Bang. Their discoveries have provided direct evidence of the explosive birth of our Milky Way galaxy, and shed light on conditions at the time of the Big Bang which began the universe itself.

Dr. Duncan is also a specialist in the behavior of stars like the sun: what they are made of, how they are born and evolve, and the "blemishes'' and eruptions which mark their surfaces -- sunspots and flares. He has worked at the Lick Observatory in California, developing a method for determining the ages of stars like the sun, and later at California’s Mt. Wilson and Palomar Observatories and at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. He was part of a group which discovered sunspot cycles on other stars, similar to the 11 year spot cycle seen on the sun. It is these spots and flare eruptions which are the cause of the earth's aurorae -- the Northern and Southern lights. Some of Dr. Duncan's most interesting work involved the discovery that when the sun was young it may have been spinning much faster than it is today, throwing off large amounts of material, and radiating strong ultraviolet and x-rays into space. This may well have affected the earth when it was young, and possibly even the development of life.

Dr. Duncan is a national leader in presenting the excitement of scientific discoveries to the general public and a very popular speaker. At the age of 19 he became the youngest planetarium speaker ever hired at the Griffith Observatory in Hollywood, California. He has appeared on BBC television and on the National Public Radio Program All Things Considered, and has lectured at the Smithsonian Institution. He has led groups of people in photographing Halley's comet in South America, to total eclipses of the sun, and into the Arctic to photograph the aurora. In 1995 he was elected to the Board of Directors of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, the country's largest organization for amateur and professional astronomers, and from 1997-2002 he appeared regularly on the Chicago public radio station WBEZ.

Among his avocations, Dr. Duncan counts hiking and exploring, mountaineering, and photography. He "grew up in'' the Sierra Nevada mountains in California, and has traveled in the Alps, the Chilean Andes, the Himalayas and the Brazilian Amazon, as well as sea-kayaked along the coast of Alaska. In April, 1993, he traveled to the North Pole, and was elected to The Explorers Club (of New York).

His Internet home page may be found at http://casa.colorado.edu/~dduncan