Photo 2009 by Brian Wilson, courtesy Princeton University
James Edward Gunn
21 October 1938	2013 Bruce Medalist

“Jim” Gunn was born in Texas and earned his B.S. in mathematics and physics at Rice University. He received his Ph.D. in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology in 1965 with a thesis on cosmology and the distribution of galaxies. While graduate students, he and Bruce Peterson predicted the Gunn-Peterson trough in the spectra of distant quasars. He has continued to work in several fields of theoretical astrophysics and cosmology and has contributed to the understanding of quasars, pulsars, cosmic rays, magnetic fields in a number of astronomical objects, and especially, galaxies. Working at Princeton University (1968-70 and since 1980) and Caltech (1970-80) he has also participated in many observations. He is primarily known as a designer and builder of instruments and as the leader of an enterprise which has had an enormous impact on the way that observational astronomy is done. Once quoted as saying, “You want an instrument so badly that finally you have to go and build it yourself,” he has made a career of doing just that. A gadgeteer and telescope builder since childhood, he built a photoelectric spectrum scanner at the Jet Propulsion Lab and then the “4-shooter,” a camera for the Hale 5-m telescope. One of the first astronomical cameras to use CCDs and to do drift scanning, it led to the discovery of quasars at record redshifts. Next he led the team that designed the original Wide Field/Planetary Camera for the Hubble Space Telescope. In 1987 Gunn proposed the idea of putting an array of CCDs on a 2.5m-telescope and using it for both images and spectra, scanning the entire visible sky in about five years and building an enormous data archive which could be used for far more than his main interest, determining the three-dimensional structure of the universe of galaxies. This ultimately became the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and Gunn devoted a large portion of his career to building it and making it work. The product of collaborations of unprecedented size in ground-based astronomy, the SDSS has been a great success. The first two surveys, made from 2000 to 2008, led to three-dimensional maps of the Universe containing more than 930,000 galaxies and 120,000 quasars. Four additional surveys are currently underway. Today astronomers—and anyone else—can perform a great deal of research without a telescope by mining the online data from SDSS. Gunn retired as Higgins Professor of Astronomy in 2011 but remains fully active in research.

Personal web page
At Princeton University.

Presentation of Bruce medal
See the ASP website.

Other awards
American Astronomical Society, Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics, 1988; Joseph Weber Award for Astronomical Instrumentation, 2002; Henry Norris Russell Lectureship, 2005.
Canadian Astronomical Society, R.M. Petrie Prize Lecture, 2001.
Gruber Foundation, Cosmology Prize, 2005.
MacArthur Foundation, MacArthur Fellowship, 1983.
National Science Foundation, National Medal of Science, 2008.
Royal Astronomical Society, Gold Medal, 1994.
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Crafoord Prize, 2005 (SDSS press release).

Biographical materials
Finkbeiner, Ann, A Grand and Bold Thing: An Extraordinary New Map of the Universe Ushering in a New Era of Discovery (Free Press, NY, 2010).
Gunn, James E., interview with Alan Lightman, in Lightman, Alan & Roberta Brawer, Origins: The Lives and Worlds of Modern Cosmologists (Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, MA, 1990), pp. 250-65.
Preston, Richard, First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe (Atlantic Monthly Press, NY, 1996).

Photos
AIP Center for History of Physics
Princeton University: Gunnfest, 1999

Named after him
Minor Planet #18243 Gunn
Comet 65P/Gunn
Gunn-Peterson Trough (or Effect, with Bruce Peterson)

More references