Dr. William Bottke

Dr. William Bottke is the Director of the Department for Space Studies at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. Bottke is also the Director of the Center for Lunar Origin and Evolution (CLOE) of NASA’s Lunar Science Institute. His research interests include the collisional and dynamical evolution of small body populations throughout the solar system (e.g., asteroids, comets, irregular satellites, Kuiper belt objects, meteoroids, dust) and the formation and bombardment history of planetesimals, planets and satellites. He is also interested in how near-Earth objects (NEOs) are delivered from their source regions in various asteroid and cometary populations to their observed orbits. He received a B.S. with High Distinction in Physics and Astrophysics from the University of Minnesota in 1988, and a Ph.D. in Planetary Science from the University of Arizona in 1995. The University of Arizona also awarded him the Gerard P. Kuiper Memorial Award in 1995. Bottke was a Texaco Prize Fellow at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) from 1996-1997, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University from 1997-2000. Asteroid 1995 HN2 was named (7355) Bottke in 1999. In 2011, he was awarded the first Paolo Farinella Prize at the joint EPSC-DPS 2011 meeting in Nantes, France by the University of Pisa, the Space Academy Foundation, IASF-INAF and IFSI-INAF (Rome).

Surname: 
Bottke
Title/Given Name: 
Dr. William
Nation(s): 
USA
Start: 
2012