William P. Blair

William P. Blair is an Astrophysicist and Research Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University and was Deputy Project Scientist for Mission Planning and Operations for the Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope project. Dr. Blair was also a member of the Instrument Definition Team for the Faint Object Spectrograph, an instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope. He has been at Johns Hopkins since 1984, and was involved in the mission planning activities for the Astro-1 space shuttle mission in 1990 and the Astro-2 mission in March 1995. Dr. Blair's current position is with the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) project at Johns Hopkins, where he is Chief of Observatory Operations. (FUSE is a satellite developed by JHU for NASA, and launched June 24, 1999, originally for a three-year mission. After NASA granted several extensions, the satellite operations were terminated in October 2007 due to hardware failures in the pointing system.) In 2002, Dr. Blair was appointed as a FUSE Co-Investigator by NASA, and was made Deputy Principal Investigator of the project at JHU.

Dr. Blair's main scientific interests lie in the areas of gaseous nebulae and the interstellar medium. In particular, he studies supernova remnants and shock waves in a wide variety of astrophysical situations, using techniques as diverse as ground-based optical imaging and spectroscopy, space-based optical and ultraviolet spectroscopy, and X-ray observations. In addition to his work with HUT and FOS, Dr. Blair has ongoing research proposals to analyze data from the Hubble Space Telescope, the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, in addition to data from FUSE and from ground-based telescopes.

Dr. Blair also maintains an interest in cataclysmic variable stars, which are binary star systems locked in very tight orbital configurations such that matter is transferred between the two stars, as well as other astrophysical problems involving the analysis of optical and ultraviolet emission line spectra. Dr. Blair has over 200 publications, primarily technical refereed research papers and conference proceedings contributions.

Dr. Blair obtained a B.A. in 1975 from Olivet College in Olivet, Michigan, majoring in Physics and Mathematics. He obtained an M.S. (1977) and Ph.D. (1981) in Astronomy from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), getting his degree under the supervision of Dr. Robert P. Kirshner (now in the Astronomy Department at Harvard, and past president of the American Astronomical Society). After three years as an Astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Dr. Blair came to Johns Hopkins in 1984.

In May 1998, Dr. Blair was honored as a "Distinguished Alumnus" by his Alma Mater, Olivet College. He has presented invited review talks on supernova remnants at international conferences in China, Spain, Italy, and many local conferences.

Dr. Blair is married, and he and his wife, Jean, have two children, Amy (20) from Seoul, South Korea, and Jeremy (18) from Calcutta, India.

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Last updated: November 2007.