Dr. Dominic J. Benford

Dominic joined NASA at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland in 2001. While there, he worked on the Herschel Space Observatory, the SOFIA Observatory instruments HAWC, SAFIRE, and HAWC+, developed novel detector technologies, and was the Mission Scientist for WISE. He has been at NASA Headquarters in the Astrophysics Division since 2013, where he is the Program Scientist for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, the top priority mission recommendation from the National Academy of Sciences in 2010. The mission will conduct major surveys in the near-infrared to answer fundamental questions on the nature of dark energy, the distribution of dark matter, the occurrence of planets around other stars, and will enable the direct imaging of exoplanetary systems.

Dominic's astronomical research interests are in extragalactic astrophysics and cosmology, with an emphasis on the formation and evolution of galaxies and their stars. His sincere wish is that the vast wealth of data from the Roman Space Telescope will inspire astronomers everywhere, professional and amateur alike, to study the heavens in ways never before possible.

Dominic has been a National Research Council postdoctoral fellow with Harvey Moseley. He earned the Ph.D. degree from the California Institute of Technology in 1999 under the supervision of Tom Phillips, and the B.A. degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1992 working for Paul Richards. His Erdös number is no more than three, his Zwicky number is two, and his Einstein number is no more than four, but his Bacon number is still undefined.