The Samuel Newton Taylor Lecture Endowment Presents Dr. Kenneth Sembach

Release date: April 28, 2010

Kenneth Sembach,  head of the Space Telescope Science Institute’s Hubble Mission Office, will present a multimedia lecture titled “The Hubble Space Telescope: Revealing Universal Wonders with Human Ingenuity” on Wednesday, April 28, at 7 p.m. in the Hyman Forum of Goucher College’s Athenaeum.

The lecture, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the Samuel Newton Taylor Lecture Endowment and presented by Goucher College’s Department of Physics and Astronomy.

The lecture will feature a multimedia presentation that will include new photos taken during the recent Hubble Telescope Service Mission and rare video from the shuttle launch and servicing activities.

Sembach is interested in the physical properties of the intergalactic medium, the interactions between galaxies and their surrounding media, and the origin and evolution of the chemical elements as a function of cosmic time.  He has been involved with the Hubble Space Telescope for almost two decades.

His astronomical research uses large ground-based telescopes as well as space-based observatories, such as the Hubble Space Telescope. He is also interested in the design, operation, and technological development of observatories in space.  He recently led several NASA concept studies for future space telescopes and enabling technologies.

As a tenured astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore and the head of the institute’s Hubble Mission Office, Sembach oversees the observatory’s day-to-day operations. He’s involved in all the scientific, operational, and managerial aspects of the Hubble Space Telescope and works closely with the Mission Operations and Hubble Management Teams at the Goddard Space Flight Center.

Before leading the Hubble Mission Office, Sembach served as the institute’s Hubble project scientist, the lead of the advanced camera for surveys team, the institute’s two-gyro mode scientist, and the instrument scientist for the cosmic origins spectrograph.

Sembach earned a doctorate in astronomy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a bachelor of science with honors from the University of Chicago. In 1992, he was awarded a Hubble Fellowship to conduct astronomical research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2001, he received the Newton Lacy Pierce Prize of the American Astronomical Society, an award recognizing outstanding scientific achievement in observational astronomical research.

He has published more than 150 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

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