James R. Graham

Graham pursued physics as his undergraduate major at Imperial College London, graduated with a BSc in 1982. He went on at Imperial College London to receive his PhD in physics in 1985.{{cite web | title = James Graham, Professor, Berkeley Astronomy Department | url = http://astro.berkeley.edu/people/faculty/graham.html | accessdate = 24 January 2010}} After receiving his PhD, Graham first held a research position at Lawrence Berkeley Lab, followed by a position at the California Institute of Technology. Since 1992, he has been a professor of astronomy at University of California, Berkeley.

In 1994, Graham was a member of a team that made one of the first definitive identifications of a brown dwarf in the Pleiades open cluster, which was also one of the first important discoveries made using the Keck telescopes.{{cite news | title = Big Telescope Is First to Find Brown Dwarf, Team Reports | author = Wilford, John Noble | date = 14 June 1995 | accessdate = 24 January 2010 | url = https://www.nytimes.com/1995/06/14/us/big-telescope-is-first-to-find-brown-dwarf-team-reports.html | work=The New York Times}} In the preceding years, other claims of brown dwarf detections were made and then often retracted or disputed. Graham's team looked for the signature of lithium absorption lines in the spectrum of the object. Lithium is quickly depleted in low mass stars due to mixing that brings the lithium in to contact with the hydrogen fusing core.{{cite journal | doi = 10.2307/3978840 | author = Cowen, R. | title = Brown dwarfs: Finding the lithium benchmark | journal = Science News | volume = 147 | issue = 25 | date = 1995 | pages = 389 | publisher = Society for Science & the Public | jstor = 3978841}} As brown dwarfs by definition lack hydrogen fusion, the presence of lithium in the atmosphere of a low mass object is either an indicator of extreme youth or the absence of fusion. As such, the abundance of lithium in the atmosphere of PPL 15, along with the estimated age of the stars in Pleaides, indicate that PPL 15 is a brown dwarf.

Image:Fomalhaut with Disk Ring and extrasolar planet b.jpg

Graham was involved in another first in 2008, when he was a member of the team that announced the detection of Fomalhaut b, the first exoplanet detected in visible light.{{cite news | title = Out of this World Pictures: First Direct Photos of Exoplanets | author = Matson, John | date = 7 November 2008 | accessdate = 24 January 2010 | url = http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=exoplanets-direct-imaging}} Graham had first used the Hubble Space Telescope to take images of the debris disk around Fomalhaut in 2004, and from the structure of the disk, he and his team inferred the presence of a planet.{{cite journal |author1=Kalas, P. |author2=Graham, J. R. |author3=Clampin, M. | title = A planetary system as the origin of structure in Fomalhaut's dust belt | journal = Nature | volume = 435 | issue = 7045 | pages = 1067–1070 | date = 2005 | pmid = 15973402 | doi = 10.1038/nature03601 | bibcode=2005Natur.435.1067K|arxiv = astro-ph/0506574 }} Follow-up observations of the disk showed that a tiny speck of light at the inner edge of the disk was moving in orbit about Fomalhaut, as predicted.

Currently, Graham is working to detect many more planets by direct imaging. Graham is the project scientist for the Gemini Planet Imager, an extreme adaptive optics instrument that is on schedule to begin operation in 2013 at the Gemini Observatory in Chile. Imaging extrasolar planets is complicated primarily by the overwhelming brightness of the host star as compared to the planet, which Graham likens to "seeing a firefly next to a searchlight," and the distortions caused by random movement of air in the Earth's atmosphere.{{cite news|title=ScienceMatters @ Berkeley. The Firefly and the Searchlight |author=Wong, Kathleen |volume=6 |issue=46 |accessdate=24 January 2010 |url=http://sciencematters.berkeley.edu/archives/volume6/issue46/story2.php |url-status=dead |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20091030064750/http://sciencematters.berkeley.edu/archives/volume6/issue46/story2.php |archivedate=30 October 2009 }} By using a coronagraph and adaptive optics, Graham hopes to overcome both difficulties and discover many more planets by the light they emit, and in doing so, learn directly about the composition of extrasolar planets.

• Alfred P. Sloan Fellow (1992){{cite web|title=James Graham Awarded 1992 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship |url=http://www.sloan.org/fellowships/list/filter/field/lastnamef/letter/G/page/175 |url-status=dead |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20110722154744/http://www.sloan.org/fellowships/list/filter/field/lastnamef/letter/G/page/175 |archivedate=22 July 2011 }}
• Packard Fellow (1993){{cite web|title=James Graham Awarded 1993 Packard Fellowship |url=http://www.packard.org/fellowsList.aspx?RootCatID=3&CategoryID=70 |url-status=dead |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20091231070926/http://www.packard.org/fellowsList.aspx?RootCatID=3&CategoryID=70 |archivedate=31 December 2009 }}
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20140313234852/http://chemistry.berkeley.edu/about/awards.php#noyce Noyce Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (2007)]{{cite web | title = James Graham Awarded 2007 Noyce Award | url = http://astro.berkeley.edu/news/news.php?type=single&sid=10 | accessdate = 24 January 2010}}
• Newcomb Cleveland Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2009){{cite web | url = http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2010/02/18_kalas_fomalhaut.shtml | title = Images of extrasolar planets win award for most outstanding papers in Science | author = Robert Sanders | date = 18 February 2010 | accessdate = 11 March 2010}}{{cite web | url = http://www.aaas.org/aboutaaas/awards/newcomb/newcomb_winners.shtml | title = Newcomb Cleveland Prize Recipients | author = AAAS | date = November 2009 | accessdate = 21 April 2010 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20121023152927/http://www.aaas.org/aboutaaas/awards/newcomb/newcomb_winners.shtml | archive-date = 23 October 2012 | url-status = dead }}
• Miller Research Professorship with the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science at the University of California Berkeley; 2013–14

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Category:Living people

Category:Irish astrophysicists

Category:University of California, Berkeley faculty

Category:Alumni of Imperial College London

Category:Year of birth missing (living people)

Category:20th-century Irish astronomers

Category:20th-century Irish physicists

Category:21st-century Irish astronomers

Category:21st-century Irish physicists