Claude Canizares

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.