Dr. Fred Walter

Fred Walter is professor of Astronomy at Stony Brook University. He has a BS Physics from MIT and a PhD in Astronomy from the University of California at Berkeley (1981). Prior to moving to Stony Brook, he spent 8 years at the University of Colorado, where he was a member of the Instrument Development Team for the Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph, one of the original scientific instruments on the Hubble Space Telescope.

Prof. Walter's research interests include stellar weather (the chromospheres and coronal of solar-like stars), star formation, isolated neutron stars, cataclysmic variables, and novae. He is primarily a spectroscopic observer who uses the Chandra and XMM X-ray obervatories, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the FUSE satellite, as well as observatories in Hawaii and Chile. He is interested in time variable phenomena. At present he organizes the Stony Brook effort in the SMARTS consortium at the Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory. He also serves on various NASA advisory panels, and has chaired the Space Telescope Users Committee.