Robert Kennicutt


Robert Charles Kennicutt, Jr. FRS is an American astronomer. He is a former Plumian Professor of Astronomy at the Institute of Astronomy in the University of Cambridge. He was formerly Editor-in-Chief of the Astrophysical Journal. His research interests include the structure and evolution of galaxies and star formation in galaxies.
He received his bachelor's degree in physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1973. He was a graduate student in astronomy at the University of Washington, where he received his master's degree in 1976 and his Ph.D. in 1978. He was awarded the Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics in 2007 by the American Astronomical Society. He shared the 2009 Gruber Prize in Cosmology with Wendy Freedman of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and Jeremy Mould of the University of Melbourne School of Physics, for their leadership in the definitive measurement of the value of the constant of proportionality in Hubble's Law. He was made a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001 and appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2011.
Kennicutt formulated a version of the Kennicutt–Schmidt law, which is an empirical relation between the gas density and star formation rate in a given region.

Research

Spitzer Infrared Nearby Galaxies Survey

Kennicutt is the principal investigator for the Spitzer Infrared Nearby Galaxies Survey, a legacy project that performed a multiwavelength survey of 75 nearby galaxies with the Spitzer Space Telescope.