Rittenhouse Lectures
The Rittenhouse Lecture is an endowed distinguished speaker series with a long tradition of inviting world class scholars to share their groundbreaking research with the Penn community. It is named in honor of “America's First Astronomer” and Philadelphia native David Rittenhouse and sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania Department of Physics and Astronomy.
Past lecturers include:
2023 - 2024 Alan Heavens (Imperial College London)
2021 - 2022 Martha Haynes (Cornell University) "Galaxy evolution and cosmology via the 21 cm line of atomic hydrogen"
2020 - 2021 Sara Seager (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) "Exoplanets and the Search for Biosignature Gases"
2019-2020 Lars Hernquist (Harvard University) “The Illustris TNG hydrodynamic simulation of the Universe”
2018-2017 George Efstathiou "The Planck Legacy: Inflation and the Origin of Structure in the Universe"
2017-2018 Daniel Holz (Enrico Fermi Institute and Kavli Institute for Cosmology, U of Chicago) "GW170817: Hearing and Seeing a Binary Neutron Star Merger"
2016-2017 Scott Bolton (Southwest Research Institute) "Early Results from Juno's Exploration of Jupiter"
2015-2016 Adam Riess (JHU/STScI) "Expansion Of The Universe Seen By Hubble"
2014-2015 Natalia Batahla (NASA) "Towards A Reliable Determination Of Eta-earth With Kepler"
2013-2014 Scott Tremaine (Institute for Advanced Study) "Are planetary systems flat?"
2012-2013 Scott Ransom, National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO)
2011-2012 Richard Ellis (Caltech)
2010-2011 David Charbonneau
2007 - 2008 Michael Brown
2002-2003 Claude Canizares (MIT)
2001-2002 Saul Perlmutter
1999-2000 Geoffrey Marcy
1998-1999 Wendy Freedman
1997-1998 Roger Blandford
Upcoming Rittenhouse Lectures
Rittenhouse Lecture: An imperfect view of the Universe
Alan Heavens (Imperial College London)
Our most expensive telescopes make exquisite images of the distant Universe, but however good the telescope, the images are flawed. The light has been on a long journey, navigating through the rich array…