Evan D. Skillman

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Evan David Skillman (born January 27, 1955, in Rochester, New York) is an American astronomer and astrophysicist.

Education and career[edit]

Evan Skillman graduated in 1977 with a B.A. in physics from Cornell University and in 1984 with a Ph.D. in astronomy from Seattle's University of Washington. His Ph.D. thesis Physical Conditions in Giant Extragalactic H II Regions was supervised by Bruce Balick [de].[1][2] Skillman was a postdoc at the ASTRON Netherlands Foundation for Radio Astronomy, where his supervisor was Thijs van der Hulst [nl], and then at the University of Texas, where his supervisor was Gregory A. Shields. In 1989 Skillman became a faculty member in the University of Minnesota's astronomy department,[3] where he is now the director of the Minnesota Institute for Astrophysics and a College of Science and Engineering Distinguished Professor. He took leave of absence for sabbatical years at Garching's Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, where his host was Simon White, and at the University of Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy, where his host was Stephen Smartt.[3] In 2012 and 2013, Skillman was one of the leaders of the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT) project. Part of the project made available large amounts of Hubble Space Telescope image data and used volunteer citizen scientists to analyze stellar clusters in the Andromeda Galaxy. The large number of citizen scientists accomplished in 12 days what would have taken the far smaller team of professional scientists approximately one year.[4][5][6][7]

Skillman has done research on "the interstellar medium, the stellar populations, the chemical abundances, and the dark matter content of nearby galaxies, with a focus on dwarf galaxies."[3] In 2018 he was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society for "observational constraints on the primordial helium abundance and significant contributions to understanding the chemical evolution of galaxies."[8]

Family[edit]

His sister, Leslie Elaine Skillman-Hull (1953–2020), was an assistant professor in women's health care and an accomplished potter.[9] In 1990 in Minnesota, Evan Skillman married Kimberley Ann Venn, now a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Victoria. They have a daughter, but are now divorced. He has since remarried.

Selected publications[edit]

Articles[edit]

Books[edit]

  • Skillman, Evan David (1996). The Minnesota Lectures on Extragalactic Neutral Hydrogen: A Series of Lectures Presented at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, from 27 March 1994 to 2 June 1994. Astronomical Society of the Pacific Conference Series, volume 106. Astronomical Society of the Pacific. ISBN 1-886733-26-0. Skillman, Evan David (1996). e-book. Astronomical Society of the Pacific. ISBN 978-1-58381-442-0.

References[edit]

  1. ^ "Evan D. Skillmann". PhysicsTree.
  2. ^ Skillman, Evan David (1984). Physical Conditions in Giant Extragalactic H II Regions. University of Washington.
  3. ^ a b c "Biography — Evan D. Skillman". College of Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota.
  4. ^ "skillman astro intro 2 (Prof. Evan Skillman, Minnesota Institute for Astrophysics, discussing his research)". YouTube. Paul DeGeest. February 12, 2013.
  5. ^ "Taking a Census of the Andromeda Galaxy". BellMuseum. December 8, 2014.
  6. ^ Christian, Carol. "Citizen Science with Hubble Space Telescope Data" (PDF). iau.org.
  7. ^ Dalcanton, Julianne J.; et al. (2012). "The Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury". The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series. 200 (2): 18. arXiv:1204.0010. Bibcode:2012ApJS..200...18D. doi:10.1088/0067-0049/200/2/18. S2CID 38835581.
  8. ^ "APS Fellow Archive". American Physical Society. (search on year=2018 and institution=University of Minnesota)
  9. ^ "Leslie Elaine Skillman-Hull RN.C., WHCNP, Ph.D. 1953-2020". The Star-Ledger. Newark, New Jersey. March 15, 2020.
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