Professor Canizares is the Bruno Rossi Professor of Physics at MIT. He earned his BA, MA and Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University after which he came to MIT as a postdoctoral fellow and later joined as faculty. He has served as Director of the Center for Space Research, now the MIT-Kavli Institute (1990-2001), Associate Provost (2001-2006), Vice President for Research & Associate Provost (2006-2013), and Vice President (2013-2015). He is also the Associate Director of the Chandra X-ray Observatory Center.

Professor Canizares’s main research interests are high-resolution spectroscopy and plasma diagnostics of cosmic X-ray sources. He led the development of the High Resolution Transmission Grating Spectrometer on NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and of the crystal spectrometer on the earlier Einstein Observatory. He studies the properties of a wide range of Galactic and extra-Galactic X-ray sources, including active stars, black-hole or neutron star binaries, supernova remnants, quasars and clusters of galaxies. He also uses X-ray sources as probes of inter-stellar and inter-galactic matter.