Astronomy Office: Room CAS 428, 725 Commonwealth Ave.

E-Mail: marscher@bu.edu
Phone: Astronomy office: 617/353-5029

Address: Institute for Astrophysical Research, Boston University, 725 Commonwealth Ave., Boston, MA 02215

Education: Ph.D. 1977 University of Virginia (Advisor: Dr. Robert L. Brown, National Radio Astronomy Observatory). M.S. 1974 University of Virginia; B.S. 1973 in Engineering Science, Cornell University

Postdoctoral Research: 1977-78 National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council Resident Research Associate at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; 1978-81 Postgraduate Research Physicist, University of California, San Diego

Research specialties: quasars, active galaxies, high energy astrophysics, fine structure of interstellar clouds; radio, infrared, X-ray, and gamma-ray astronomy.

Publications in Scientific Journals

Papers in Conference Proceedings and Other Publications

Curriculum Vitae (PDF file, last updated 2/4/08) (see also summary below)

Go to main page of the Boston University blazar group

OK, I admit it, the photo above was taken ca. 1985. I really look like the photos below now:

With Svetlana

Teaching

Although I have taught a number of Astronomy courses for non-majors, majors, and graduate students while at Boston University, currently I teach in the Core Curriculum of the College of Arts and Sciences. The course is CC 105, The Evolution of the Universe and the Earth; I was the lead architect of the course, but a number of other professors contributed substantially. I have a personal profile on the Core Curriculum website. Together with my colleagues Scott Mohr, Scott Whitaker, and Declan De Paor, I wrote a textbook entitled From Nothing to Everything: The Evolution of the Universe and the Earth. Designed after the CC 105 course, it was custom-published by Pearson Custom Publishing in 2002.

I compose pop songs for the course and perform them in my lectures. I have recorded, and converted to MP3 format for downloading, a number of my science songs. I also perform the songs at astronomical meetings and parties, and at the annual College of Arts and Sciences/Core Curriculum Talent Review. I have a few dozen other songs unrelated to science that I have written and recorded as well. Most of these are available at soundclick.com.

I am the proud recipient of the 1998 Gitner Award for Distinguished Teaching, given by the College of Arts and Sciences. In 1999, Phi Beta Kappa, Epsilon chapter of Massachusetts at Boston University bestowed honorary membership on me. In 2003, I was given the honorary title of Distinguished Member of the National Society of Collegiate Scholars.

Administration

Between 2003 and 2007, I served as the Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching (CET) at Boston University. The CET operates a variety of programs designed to assist instructors who wish, for example, to improve their classroom performance, modernize their teaching techniques (e.g., through use of the web), or administer their courses more effectively.

From January 1999 to June 2003 I served as an Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at Boston University (half-time), with primary responsibility for faculty issues. Among my main duties were design and oversight of the College web site, running of orientation programs for new graduate teaching fellows and new "adjunct" faculty, coordination of continuing programs of language instruction for international graduate teaching fellows, identifying physical problems in classrooms that need to be fixed and acting as a liaison between instructors and Media Group, formation of a panel to determine recipients of College teaching awards, compilation of grading statistics in Arts and Sciences courses, and providing guidance to departmental chairs and to faculty.

I served as chairman of the Department of Astronomy from 1986 to 1997. During that time, the size of the academic faculty grew from 8 to 15 members, while that of the research faculty increased from 1 to 7.

Research

Note: Rather than read the following brief synopsis, you can go to the main web site for my group's research program.

My research group studies the extremely energetic plasma jets that emanate from a class of active galactic nuclei called "blazars" (radio-bright quasars and BL Lacertae objects, whose brightness tends to be highly variable and whose continuum spectra are non-thermal). The general consensus of the field is that ultra-massive (over a billion solar masses in some cases) black holes residing at the center of many galaxies power blazars as they accrete matter from their surroundings. The black holes swallow most of the gas and dust, but expel a small fraction in winds and jets along the rotation axes, at flow speeds very close to the speed of light. Such relativistic motions create illusions of faster-than-light speeds and beams the radiation emitted such that observers viewing the jet almost along the axis measure a very high brightness that varies on timescales as short as hours. The work of my group focuses on monitoring the changing brightness at radio, infrared, X-ray, and gamma-ray frequencies as well as the evolving radio-frequency structure of the jet on sub-milliarcsecond scales. Telescopes used currently include the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), the Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer (RXTE), the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (CGRO, now defunct), the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the XMM-Newton X-ray observatory, and the hard X-ray/soft gamma-ray satellite INTEGRAL, operated by the European Space Agency. After NASA's GLAST gamma-ray observatory is launched in mid-2008, we will devote significant effort to multiwaveband observations to correlate with the gamma-ray light curves from many blazars.

My group also engages in a theoretical program focused on the gas dynamics and radiative processes that occur in the jets of blazars. The main goal is to provide models that can be used to interpret multifrequency monitoring observations of blazars in the hopes of figuring out the physics of jets: what produces them (what evidence can we obtain that it is really an accreting supermassive black hole?), what focuses and accelerates their flows to speeds very close to the velocity of light (twisting magnetic fields, gas pressure, or radiation pressure?), what accelerates the electrons to ultrarelativistic energies (shock waves - transverse to the jet axis or oblique? turbulence?), and what processes affect the emission (bends in the jet, accelerations in the flow, precession?).

Service: Committee Work

I have served on a number of professional committees. These include, among a number of others:

• NASA Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope Users Committee (2003 - present)
• Panel on the future of VLBI in the US (2003)
• External oversight committee for the VERITAS telescope, which detects TeV-energy photons from cosmic sources via atmospheric Cherenkov radiation (2003 - present)
• National Academy of Sciences Decadal Survey of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Panel on Radio, Millimeter, and Submillimeter Astronomy (1998-2000 and 2004-05)
• National Science Foundation Advisory Committee on Astronomical Sciences (1988-92)
• NASA Compton Gamma Ray Observatory Users Committee (1995-98)
• AUI Visiting Committee for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (1992-95, chair in 1995)
• National Radio Astronomy Observatory Users Committee (1984-87, 1990-93)
• ARISE Space VLBI (proposed NASA mission) Scientific Working Group (chair, 1998-present)
• Secretary-Treasurer, High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society (1997-99)
• Associated Universities for Research in Astronomy board (1993-94)
• Editorial Board, Blazar Data Journal (1998-present)

I have served on a number of University committees as well, including the College of Arts & Sciences Academic Policy Committee (1988-90, chair in 1988-89).

Go to main page of the Boston University blazar group