About Chris

Chris Impey is a University Distinguished Professor. For 17 years he was Deputy Head of the Astronomy Department at the University of Arizona, and he is currently Associate Dean of the College of Science. He has over 220 refereed publications and 80 conference proceedings in astronomy and 100 publications on educational topics. His work has been supported by $20 million in grants from NASA and the NSF. As a professor, he has won eleven teaching awards, and has been heavily involved in curriculum and instructional technology development. He has mentored 30 graduate students and 250 undergraduates. Chris Impey is a past Vice President of the American Astronomical Society. He has also been an NSF Distinguished Teaching Scholar, a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, and Carnegie Council on Teaching’s Arizona Professor of the Year. He was a co-chair of the Education and Public Outreach Study Group for the 2010 Decadal Survey of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2009 he was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and in 2014 he was the first astronomer named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor.

Chris Impey aims to convey the excitement of astronomy in as many ways as possible to a large public audience. He gives 30 public talks a year, to audiences as large as 5000 and as varied as NASA engineers, first graders, and judges of the Ninth Circuit Court. For a decade, he has traveled to India to teach Buddhist monks in a program started by the Dalai Lama. He designed and led tours for donors and alumni to Italy, Chile, Britain, and South Africa, and he has been the astronomy enrichment lecturer for 4 cruise lines: Scientific American, Norwegian, Princess, and Viking. He has written 65 popular articles on cosmology and astrobiology and co-authored two introductory textbooks. He has published 9 popular science books: The Living Cosmos (2007, Random House), How It Ends (2010, W.W. Norton), How It Began (2012, W.W. Norton), Talking About Life (2010, Cambridge Univ.), Dreams of Other Worlds (2013, Princeton), Humble Before the Void (2014, Templeton), Beyond (2015, W.W. Norton), Einstein’s Monsters (2018, Norton), and Worlds Without End (2023, MIT). His first novel, Shadow World, was published in 2013. His “Teach Astronomy” web site has had 3 million unique visitors, and his YouTube lectures and videos have 4 million views. He has surveyed 25,000 college students and members of the general public on their science literacy and attitudes towards science. About 370,000 adults from 180 countries have enrolled in his Massive Open Online Classes (MOOCs), watching over five million minutes of video lectures since 2013. His 20 online articles for The Conversation have over 3.3 million readers.