FACULTY PROFILE: Bernard E Burke Boston native and William A.M. Burden Professor of Astrophysics Bernard R. Burke completed his SB in 1950 and PhD in 1953 at MIT. In 1953, he joined the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution in Washington and became a section manager in 1957. Upon his return to MIT in 1965 as Professor of Physics, Professor Burke introduced interferometric techniques at the Haystack Radio Observatory in Westford, Massachusetts. As leader of RLE's research group in this area, he shared the 1971 Rumford Prize awarded by the Academy of A rts and Sciences. Together with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and the Canadian National Research Council, his research group developed techniques for very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI). This method uses atomic frequency standards to synchronize radio teles copes at remote locations around the world and has improved angular resolution for radio telescopes by 1000-fold. Professor Burke's group was also first to conduct inter- and transcontinental VLBI. Recently, he has served as the U.S. principal investigato r to develop orbiting VLBI stations and has also participated in European and Soviet VLBI mission studies. He has served as Visiting Professor at the University of Leiden (1971-72), Sherman Fairchild Scholar at the California Institute of Technology (1984- 85), and held a Smithsonian Regents Fellowship in 1985. In 1963, he received the Warner Prize of the Amer ican Astronomical Society and, in 1988, was corecipient of a NASA Group Achievement Award. He served as President of the American Astronomical Society (1986-88), is Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was elected to the National Acade my of Sciences in 1970. He chairs and serves on several advisory boards for NASA and the National Science Foundation, and participates on the editorial boards of many professional journals. | |
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