Dr. Stamatios Krimigis received his B. Physics from the University of Minnesota (1961), his M.S (1963) and Ph.D. (1965) in Physics from the University of Iowa, and served on the faculty there. In 1968 he moved to the Applied Physics laboratory of Johns Hopkins University, became Chief Scientist in 1980, Space Department Head in 1991, and Emeritus Head in 2004. The 600-member Space Department has designed, built and operated more than 65 spacecrafts and most of the planetary missions during his tenure.
He is Principal Investigator on several NASA spacecrafts, including Voyagers 1 and 2 to the Outer Planets, the Voyager Interstellar Mission and the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan. He and his colleagues proposed and implemented the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) mission and oversaw its landing on the asteroid Eros on February 12, 2001, the first ever landing on an asteroid. He has designed and built instruments that have flown to all eight planets, and also the New Horizons mission currently headed to Pluto. He has published more than 530 papers in peer-reviewed journals and books on the physics of the sun, interplanetary medium, planetary magnetospheres, and the heliosphere.
He is recipient of NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal twice, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, American Geophysical Union, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, recipient of COSPAR’s Space Science Award in 2002, recipient of the Basic Sciences Award of the International Academy of Astronautics where he chairs the Board of Trustees for Basic Sciences and he has been awarded with the Council of European Aerospace Societies CEAS Gold Medal for 2011. He is an Academician at the Academy of Athens since 2005, occupying the Chair of “Science of Space” and chairman of Greece’s National Council of Research and Technology.