David Turnshek

Turnshek is a 1973 graduate of Norwin High School. He received his BS (1977) from Villanova University and his PhD (1981) from the University of Arizona. He was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Research Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh (1981 -1984) and a tenure-stream Astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute (1984 -1988), where he worked on the Hubble Space Telescope as both a calibration scientist and an instrument scientist for the Goddard High Resolu­tion Spectrograph, in addition to conducting independent research.

Turnshek joined the tenure-stream faculty of the University of Pittsburgh in 1988 and is now Professor of Physics and Astronomy. He served as Chair of the Depart­ment of Physics and Astronomy from 2006 -2015 and has been Director of the Allegheny Observatory since 2008. Turnshek has held visiting appointments at Cambridge University (England), the Carnegie Observatories (Pasadena), the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), and the University of California at San Diego.

Turnshek is an internationally recognized researcher specializing in cosmology. His research emphasis is on studies of gas forming galaxies and the phenomenon of quasars, which are at the centers of some galaxies and are one million to one billion solar mass black holes accreting matter, around which form brilliant light-emitting accretion disks. Turnshek has conducted his research programs with large ground-based telescopes in Arizona, California, Hawaii, Chile and the Canary Islands, and with space telescopes like the Hubble.

To date, he has authored or co-authored about 300 publications, which have received over 8,200 citations.