Rate My Professor Timothy Beers

Timothy Beers is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Notre Dame, serving as the Grace-Rupley Professor of Physics since 2019. He was the Notre Dame Chair in Astrophysics from 2014 to 2019. Previously, he directed the Kitt Peak National Observatory (2011-2014) and held positions from assistant to distinguished professor at Michigan State University (1986-2011). His academic background includes B.S. degrees in Physics and Metallurgical Engineering from Purdue University (1979, Summa Cum Laude), A.M. (1980) and Ph.D. (1983) in Astronomy from Harvard University.

Beers' work in Space Science encompasses Galactic Archaeology, probing the chemical evolution of the Universe via metal-poor stars. He has spearheaded surveys including the HK survey (Beers et al. 1985, 1992), SEGUE/SEGUE-2—developing the metallicity pipeline—and LAMOST, identifying most stars with metallicities below 1/1000 solar. Discoveries feature r-process enhanced stars, CEMP stars (especially CEMP-no), and halo structures. He founded the R-Process Alliance (2016), co-leads JINA-CEE, and uses Gaia for stellar origins. With 550+ papers (h-index 124), key publications are “SEGUE-2: Old Milky Way Stars Near and Far” (Rockosi et al. 2022), “The R-Process Alliance: A Nearly Complete R-Process Abundance Template Derived from Ultraviolet Spectroscopy of the R-Process-Enhanced Metal-Poor Star HD 222925” (Roederer et al. 2022), “Beyond Spectroscopy I: Metallicities... from SMSS DR2 and Gaia DR2” (Huang et al. 2022), and “A Blueprint for the Milky Way’s Stellar Populations III” (An & Beers 2021). His analyses cover 400,000+ stars. Awards: APS Fellow (2016), Purdue Distinguished Alumnus (2017), Leverhulme Trust Distinguished Visiting Professor (2019), Humboldt Award (2009), among others. Beers edited for Annual Review of Astronomy & Astrophysics and chaired JINA-CEE Diversity Committee.