Dr. Krzysztof “Kris” Stanek

The article Astronomers Crunch Numbers, Universe Gets Bigger said

That intergalactic road trip to Triangulum is going to take a little longer than you had planned.
 
An Ohio State University astronomer and his colleagues have determined that the Triangulum Galaxy, otherwise known as M33, is actually about 15 percent farther away from our galaxy than previously measured.
 
This finding implies that the Hubble constant, a number that astronomers rely on to calculate a host of factors — including the size and age of the universe — could be significantly off the mark as well.
 
That means that the universe could be 15 percent bigger and 15 percent older than any previous calculations suggested.
 
The astronomers came to this conclusion after they invented a new method for calculating intergalactic distances, one that is more precise and much simpler than standard methods. Kris Stanek, associate professor of astronomy at Ohio State, and his coauthors describe the method in a paper to appear in the Astrophysical Journal.

Dr. Krzysztof “Kris” Stanek is associate professor at the Department of Astronomy of The Ohio State University. His previous position was at the faculty in the Department of Astronomy of the Harvard University. And before Harvard, he was a Research Assistant at the Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University.
 
Kris authored Extinction Map of Baade’s Window and coauthored The First DIRECT Distance Determination to a Detached Eclipsing Binary in M33, Spectroscopic Discovery of the Supernova 2003dh Associated with GRB 030329, BVRI Observations of the Optical Afterglow of GRB 990510, Distance to M31 with the Hubble Space Telescope and Hipparcos Red Clump Stars, DIRECT Distances to Nearby Galaxies Using Detached Eclipsing Binaries and Cepheids. II. Variables in the Field M31A, and Modeling the Galactic Bar Using Red Clump Giants. Read the full list of his publications!
 
He is a referee for ApJL, ApJ, AJ, A&A, MNRAS and Acta Astronomica. His work was selected as one of the Top 10 Science Breakthroughs of 2003 by Science magazine. He has completed invited talks at Arizona, Austin, Berkeley, BU, Caltech, Columbia, Harvard, LLNL, MIT, Minnesota, NYU, Ohio State, UPenn, PennState, Princeton and Stanford. He earned the 1999 Hubble Postdoctoral Fellowship, the 1992 Merit Princeton University Fellowship, the 1992 A. Piekara Prize from the Polish Physical Society, the 1992 L. Michejda Prize from the Warsaw U., Dept. of Physics, and the 1991 T. Chlebowski Fellowship from Warsaw University.
 
Kris earned a M.Sc. in Astronomy from the Warsaw University in 1991, a M.A. from Princeton University in 1994, and a Ph.D. on the Properties of the Inner Galaxy from Princeton University in 1996.
 
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