Judith Pipher
American astrophysicist and observational astronomer
Judith Lynn Pipher (née Bancroft, June 18, 1940 – February 21, 2022) was a Canadian-born American astrophysicist and observational astronomer. She was Professor Emerita of Astronomy at the University of Rochester and directed the C. E. K. Mees Observatory from 1979 to 1994. She made important contributions to the development of infrared detector arrays in space telescopes.
Early life and education
Judith Lynn Bancroft was born on June 18, 1940, in Toronto, Ontario, to Earl Lester Alexander Bancroft and Agnes May Kathleen (née McGowan) Bancroft. She was named Junior Miss Homemaker of Ontario when she was sixteen years old. She graduated from Leaside High School in 1958 and earned a B.A. in astronomy from the University of Toronto in 1962. Following her graduation, she moved to the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York where she taught science and attended Cornell University. In the late 1960s, she worked as a graduate student of Martin Harwit on a cryogenic rocket telescope experiment. She received her Ph.D from Cornell in 1971. Her dissertation, Rocket Submillimeter Observations of the Galaxy and Background, led her into research in the nascent fields of submillimeter and infrared astronomy.
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This entry incorporates text from “Judith Pipher” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.