Hakeem Oluseyi | |
---|---|
Born | James Edward Plummer Jr. March 13, 1967 New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S. |
Education | Tougaloo College (BS) Stanford University (MS, PhD) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Physics, astrophysics, cosmology, electrical engineering, science education |
Institutions |
|
Thesis | Development of a Global Model of the Sun's Atmosphere with a Focus on the Solar Transition Region (2000) |
Doctoral advisor | Arthur B. C. Walker Jr. |
Hakeem Muata Oluseyi [1] (born James Edward Plummer Jr.; [2] March 13, 1967) [3] [4] is an American astrophysicist, cosmologist, inventor, educator, science communicator, author, actor, veteran, and humanitarian.
Hakeem Oluseyi was born James Edward Plummer Jr. [1] [5] in New Orleans, Louisiana. After his parents divorced when he was four years old, he and his mother moved to a different state along the southern border of the US every year. He lived in some of the country's toughest neighborhoods including the 9th Ward of New Orleans; Watts, Los Angeles, California; Inglewood, California; South Park, Houston, Texas; and Third Ward, Houston, Texas before settling in rural Mississippi a month before Oluseyi turned 13 years old. He completed middle school and high school in the East Jasper School District graduating as his high school's valedictorian in 1985. Oluseyi served in the U.S. Navy from 1984 to 1986. He credits the Navy with teaching him algebra. [1]
After leaving the Navy with an honorable discharge due to a skin condition from which he had suffered since he was a child, Oluseyi enrolled in Tougaloo College where he earned Bachelor of Science degrees in physics and mathematics. In 1991, he became a graduate student at Stanford University. He earned an M.S. degree in physics in 1995. [1]
Oluseyi considered dropping out of Stanford due to the culture shock he experienced coming from Mississippi, where he had attended an all-black high school followed by an HBCU. Compared with his previous schooling, where "everybody's in the same economic position," Oluseyi recalled that at Stanford, "how you dressed, how you talked, all these sort of things mattered. [. . .] It was really very difficult at first." Oluseyi eventually found a mentor in solar physicist Arthur B. C. Walker Jr., who helped him adjust to the environment, and completed his schooling at Stanford. [1]
In recognition of how much his life had changed since his troubled childhood, he changed his name to Hakeem ("wise" in Arabic) Muata ("he who speaks the truth" in Swahili) Oluseyi ("God has done this" in Yoruba) in 1996. [1]
Oluseyi earned his Ph.D. degree in physics from Stanford in 1999. [1] [6] Walker continued to mentor Oluseyi, who instructed him in experimental space research. Under Walker's tutelage, Oluseyi helped to design, build, calibrate, and launch the Multi-Spectral Solar Telescope Array (MSSTA), which pioneered normal incidence extreme ultraviolet and soft x-ray imaging of the Sun's transition region and corona.
Oluseyi is a member of Kappa Alpha Psi.
From 1999 to 2001 he worked on semiconductor research at Applied Materials. From 2001 to 2004 he was a research fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, working on the Dark Energy Camera and Vera C. Rubin Observatory. [7]
From 2007 to 2019, he was on the faculty of the Florida Institute of Technology in the departments of Physics and Space Sciences. His academic rank was distinguished research professor. [6] From 2016 to 2019. he was stationed at NASA Headquarters in Washington DC where he was the Space Sciences education manager for NASA's Science Mission Directorate via the Intergovernmental Personnel Act Mobility Program. [6] [8] Oluseyi was named a Visiting Robinson Professor at George Mason University in 2021, a distinction by which the university recognizes outstanding faculty. [9]
In 2021, he published an autobiography titled: A Quantum Life: My Unlikely Journey from the Street to the Stars co-authored with Joshua Horwitz. [7] As of 2022, Oluseyi is the president of the National Society of Black Physicists. [10]
His best known scientific contributions are research on the transfer of mass and energy through the Sun's atmosphere; the development of space-borne observatories for studying astrophysical plasmas and dark energy; and the development of technologies in ultraviolet optics, [11] [12] [13] [14] detectors, [15] [16] [17] [18] computer chips, [19] [20] [21] [22] and ion propulsion. [23]
In 2021, Oluseyi carried out an investigation into the role that former NASA administrator James Webb played in the Lavender Scare of the 1950s and 1960s, after a number of scientists and journalists had raised concerns about the naming of NASA's new space telescope after him. Contrary to the claims of Webb's critics, Oluseyi found there was no evidence that Webb was implicated. [24] His finding was later confirmed by a full report carried out by NASA itself. [25]
Oluseyi appears as a commentator and scientific authority on Science Channel television shows including How the Universe Works , Outrageous Acts of Science , Curiosity , NASA's Unexplained Files, Space's Deepest Secrets, and Strip the Cosmos ,. [26] He also appeared as a 'bakineering' (baking and engineering) judge on Netflix's Baking Impossible . [27] [28] He appeared on the National Geographic Channel show Evacuate Earth.[ citation needed ] Oluseyi appeared in the ABC special Truth and Lies: Hubris on the High Seas, which examined the Titan submersible implosion. [29]
He contributed science articles to the news media, including The Washington Post . [30] He lent his voice and scientific expertise to the award-winning science education video game ExoTrex: A Space Science Adventure Game in collaboration with Dig-It! Games. [31]
He co-authored the children's popular science book Discovery Spaceopedia: The Complete Guide to Everything Space. [32]
Oluseyi met his wife, Jessica, at Tougaloo College. They have a daughter and a son. Oluseyi has a son from an earlier relationship. [33]
An optical coating is one or more thin layers of material deposited on an optical component such as a lens, prism or mirror, which alters the way in which the optic reflects and transmits light. These coatings have become a key technology in the field of optics. One type of optical coating is an anti-reflective coating, which reduces unwanted reflections from surfaces, and is commonly used on spectacle and camera lenses. Another type is the high-reflector coating, which can be used to produce mirrors that reflect greater than 99.99% of the light that falls on them. More complex optical coatings exhibit high reflection over some range of wavelengths, and anti-reflection over another range, allowing the production of dichroic thin-film filters.
The Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) is an instrument on the SOHO spacecraft used to obtain high-resolution images of the solar corona in the ultraviolet range. The EIT instrument is sensitive to light of four different wavelengths: 17.1, 19.5, 28.4, and 30.4 nm, corresponding to light produced by highly ionized iron (XI)/(X), (XII), (XV), and helium (II), respectively. EIT is built as a single telescope with a quadrant structure to the entrance mirrors: each quadrant reflects a different colour of EUV light, and the wavelength to be observed is selected by a shutter that blocks light from all but the desired quadrant of the main telescope.
Transition Region and Coronal Explorer was a NASA heliophysics and solar observatory designed to investigate the connections between fine-scale magnetic fields and the associated plasma structures on the Sun by providing high-resolution images and observation of the solar photosphere, the transition region, and the solar corona. A main focus of the TRACE instrument is the fine structure of coronal loops low in the solar atmosphere. TRACE is the third spacecraft in the Small Explorer program, launched on 2 April 1998, and obtained its last science image on 21 June 2010, at 23:56 UTC.
NuSTAR is a NASA space-based X-ray telescope that uses a conical approximation to a Wolter telescope to focus high energy X-rays from astrophysical sources, especially for nuclear spectroscopy, and operates in the range of 3 to 79 keV.
Extreme ultraviolet lithography is a technology used in the semiconductor industry for manufacturing integrated circuits (ICs). It is a type of photolithography that uses 13.5 nm extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light from a laser-pulsed tin (Sn) plasma to create intricate patterns on semiconductor substrates.
The Multi-Spectral Solar Telescope Array (MSSTA) was a sounding rocket payload built by Professor Arthur B. C. Walker Jr. at Stanford University in the 1990s to test EUV/XUV imaging of the Sun using normal incidence EUV-reflective multilayer optics. MSSTA contained a large number of individual telescopes, all trained on the Sun and all sensitive to slightly different wavelengths of ultraviolet light. Like all sounding rockets, MSSTA flew for approximately 14 minutes per mission, about 5 minutes of which were in space—just enough time to test a new technology or yield "first results" science. MSSTA is one of the last solar observing instruments to use photographic film rather than a digital camera system such as a CCD. MSSTA used film instead of a CCD in order to achieve the highest possible spatial resolution and to avoid the electronics difficulty presented by the large number of detectors that would have been required for its many telescopes.
Arthur Bertram Cuthbert Walker Jr. was an African-American solar physicist and a pioneer of EUV/XUV optics. He developed normal incidence multilayer XUV telescopes to photograph the solar corona. Two of his sounding rocket payloads, the Stanford/MSFC Rocket Spectroheliograph Experiment and the Multi-Spectral Solar Telescope Array, recorded the first full-disk, high-resolution images of the Sun in XUV with conventional geometries of normal incidence optics. This technology is used in solar telescopes such as SOHO/EIT and TRACE, and in the fabrication of microchips via ultraviolet photolithography.
Hinode, formerly Solar-B, is a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency Solar mission with United States and United Kingdom collaboration. It is the follow-up to the Yohkoh (Solar-A) mission and it was launched on the final flight of the M-V rocket from Uchinoura Space Center, Japan on 22 September 2006 at 21:36 UTC. Initial orbit was perigee height 280 km, apogee height 686 km, inclination 98.3 degrees. Then the satellite maneuvered to the quasi-circular Sun-synchronous orbit over the day/night terminator, which allows near-continuous observation of the Sun. On 28 October 2006, the probe's instruments captured their first images.
The Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer was a NASA space telescope for ultraviolet astronomy. EUVE was a part of NASA's Explorer spacecraft series. Launched on 7 June 1992 with instruments for ultraviolet (UV) radiation between wavelengths of 7 and 76 nm, the EUVE was the first satellite mission especially for the short-wave ultraviolet range. The satellite compiled an all-sky survey of 801 astronomical targets before being decommissioned on 31 January 2001.
Richard Brice Hoover is a physicist who has authored 33 volumes and 250 papers on astrobiology, extremophiles, diatoms, solar physics, X-ray/EUV optics and meteorites. He holds 11 U.S. patents and was 1992 NASA Inventor of the Year. He was employed at the United States' NASA Marshall Space Flight Center from 1966 to 2012, where he worked on astrophysics and astrobiology. He established the Astrobiology Group there in 1997 and until his retirement in late 2011 he headed their astrobiology research. He conducted research on microbial extremophiles in the Antarctic, microfossils, and chemical biomarkers in precambrian rocks and in carbonaceous chondrite meteorites. Hoover has published claims to have discovered fossilized microorganisms in a collection of select meteorites on multiple occasions.
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The Focusing Optics X-ray Solar Imager, or FOXSI, is a sounding rocket payload built by UC Berkeley and led by Säm Krucker to test high energy grazing-incidence focusing optics paired with solid-state pixelated detectors to observe the Sun. FOXSI is composed of seven identical Wolter-I telescope modules, as well as Silicon and Cadmium Telluride strip detectors originally developed for the HXT telescope on the Japanese Hitomi mission. The FOXSI payload flew two times, most recently in 2014 and previously in 2012, on the Black Brant IX sounding rocket. Like most sounding rockets, FOXSI flew for approximately 15 minutes per mission and observed the Sun for about 5 minutes while in space. During its first flight, FOXSI successfully imaged a solar microflare in the hard x-ray band for the first time.
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Daniel Lobb was a designer of optical instruments and imaging spectrometers.
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Keith H. Jackson was an American physicist, a professor of physics, and former president of the National Society of Black Physicists.
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