Astrophysicist John Mather

James Webb Space Telescope

Nobel laureate John Mather, 74, is Senior Astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and Senior Project Scientist on the James Webb Space Telescope, the most advanced technology ever made by humans. It took $10 billion, 20,000 people, and lots of out-of-the-box problem-solving to build this extraordinary instrument that pushed so many technological boundaries its success wasn’t guaranteed. Now the Webb has its eye on the early universe billions of years ago, and is poised to discover exotic new cosmological objects never before imagined by astronomers.

For his doctoral thesis at the University of California, Berkeley, John co-designed an instrument to detect radiation that was predicted to be left over from the Big Bang. The instrument failed dismally in three different ways, but John did not abandon his search for evidence of the universe’s explosive origin. In 2006 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for developing a satellite that mapped the so-called cosmic background radiation, the present-day signature of the Big Bang. John grew up in Sussex County, New Jersey, on a research dairy farm operated by Rutgers University. He is extremely nearsighted, unlike the Webb whose vision is 80 times more powerful than Hubble.