Dr. Marc Postman

Marc Postman is a senior astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, MD. The Institute is the science and operations center for the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes. Dr. Postman is the head of the Institute’s Community Missions Office, which provides science operations support for a number of additional missions and projects including the data management center for the Kepler Mission and the data archive center for all of NASA’s optical/UV missions.

Dr. Postman’s background is in observational astronomy. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an undergraduate from 1978 to 1981, receiving a B.S. in Physics in 1981. He then went on to obtain his Ph.D. in Astronomy at Harvard University between 1981 and 1986. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1986, he accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University’s Department of Astronomy. In 1989, he joined the scientific staff at the Space Telescope Science Institute, where he has been ever since.

His principle research interest has been the formation and evolution of structure in the universe, from galaxies to the largest superclusters. He was a member of the science investigation team for the Advanced Camera for Surveys instrument that was deployed on the Hubble Space Telescope in 2002. He led several investigations with this camera to understand the origins of massive galaxies in dense clusters by imaging such systems across a time span of 9 billion years. Recently, Dr. Postman’s team was selected to conduct a multi-cycle program with HST to study dark matter and dark energy. Dr. Postman was also the P.I. for a NASA concept study on the next generation UVOIR space telescope known as ATLAST. Dr. Postman has published over 100 refereed research articles.