Name: Dr. Antony Stark

Position: Scientist, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Biography: Tony Stark graduated with honors in Physics and Astronomy from the California Institute of Technology, and went on to a doctorate in Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University under Arno Penzias. He became a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories in the Radio Physics Research group of Robert W. Wilson, where he worked on high-frequency radio instrumentation. He is author of over a hundred articles in scientific journals, including the Bell Laboratories HI Survey and the Bell Laboratories CO Survey, two of the largest and most frequently-used data sets on our Milky Way Galaxy. Along with fellow Bell Labs scientist Mark Dragovan, Stark made some of the first measurements to establish the Antarctic Plateau as a superior observatory site for sensitive radioastronomical observations. He has worked at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station for 18 summer seasons since 1986. He was Principal Investigator and designer of the Antarctic Submillimeter Telescope and Remote Observatory (AST/RO), a 1.7 meter diameter telescope that operated at the Pole for a decade. He was one of the founders of the Center for Astrophysical Research in Antarctica, an NSF Science and Technology Center that established and operated an observatory with four telescopes at Pole. In 1991, he became an astronomer with the Radio and Geoastronomy Division of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. Currently, he is a Co-Principal Investigator of the South Pole Telescope (SPT), a 10 meter diameter telescope that became operational in February 2007. The SPT has begun a survey of clusters of galaxies in order to determine the properties of the Dark Energy that drives the dynamics of the Universe. He is also a co-investigator in the NASA Stratospheric Terahertz Observatory, a long-duration balloon observatory that will fly from McMurdo Sound in the next decade.