Jo Cline Lecture

2025 Jo Cline Memorial Lecture

Harvard Astronomer Grant Tremblay will give the 2025 Jo Cline Memorial Lecture on Friday, September 26th in Koury Auditorium, building 19 on the Jamestown campus map. The physical address is 621 E. Main St., Jamestown, NC, 27282. Guests should park in Lot F.

The Sky & Other Ghosts: Our Fading Age of Discovery

Grant Tremblay, Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

About the talk: We are in a new golden age of cosmic discovery. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is our new great time machine in the sky, poised to write new chapters of the cosmic story. We’re celebrating the 25th launch anniversary of the Chandra X-ray Observatory, now force-multiplying JWST’s power to witness the growth of black holes at cosmic dawn. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope marches toward launch, the Vera Rubin Observatory has seen First Light, and our national community must never forget that we are profoundly lucky as a field, enjoying enormous support by a taxpaying public that so effortlessly shares in our wonderment of the cosmos. And yet, as I join you all to celebrate these triumphs, I fear that we are walking a knife's edge of completely losing the decade and far beyond. This talk will begin with an urgent and fairly gloomy summary of the looming threats to global (not just national) efforts meant to grow cosmic discovery into the latter half of this century. It will end with optimism, a plea, and a discussion with the audience about why we build telescopes, and why grand pursuits of discovery are worth the cost.

Dr. Grant Tremblay is an Astrophysicist and Director of External Relations at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, and Vice President of the American Astronomical Society (AAS). Previously, he was a NASA Einstein Fellow at Yale University, a Fellow at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) near Munich, and an Astronomer at ESO's Very Large Telescope in Chile. He has authored more than 100 publications in astronomical journals and three books for the general public, including The Sky and Other Ghosts, coming next year from Princeton Press. He frequently appears on Science and Discovery Channel documentary series including How the Universe Works, as well as in recent and forthcoming projects with the BBC and PBS NOVA.

The Jo Cline Memorial Astronomy Day Lecture is made possible, in part, by an endowment established by Don Cline in September 2015 with an initial funding goal of $50,000. Interest from the endowment provides annual ongoing support of the Jo Cline Fall Astronomy Lecture Series. Cline will match, dollar for dollar, contributions made to this fund until our goal is reached.

Please consider honoring Jo’s memory by contributing to the fund. For information about and donations to the Jo Cline Endowment, visit our Support the Observatory page.

Past Lectures

2024

Dan Scolnic, Duke University, "How We Measure the Expansion Rate of the Universe and What Could Be Wrong with our Standard Model." Click here to watch a video of this presentation.

2023

Rogier Windhorst, Arizona State University, "World of Webb, and Seeing through the Eyes of Einstein" Click here to watch a video of this presentation.

2022

Rebekah Dawson, Penn State University, "Beyond Eta Earth: Exoplanets as a Window on the History and Habitability of Planetary Systems" Click here to watch a video of this presentation.

2021

Sheperd S. Doeleman, Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics/EHT, "First Pictures of a Black Hole! Imaging a Black Hole with the Event Horizon Telescope"

2020

No Lecture held in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic

2019

Cathy Olkin, SWRI, "Exploring the Outer Reaches of Our Solar System"

2018

Gabriela González, LSU/LIGO, “Einstein, Gravitational Waves, Black Holes, and Other Matters

2017

John Mather, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, “The History of the Universe from the Beginning to the End: Where Did We Come From, Where Can We Go?”

2016

David Charbonneau, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, “How to Find an Inhabited Exoplanet”

2015

Sean Solomon, Director, Lamont-Doherty Earth Institute, and Principal Investigator for the Mercury MESSENGER Mission, “The MESSENGER Spacecraft Mission to Mercury: Surprises from the Innermost Planet”

2014

Jocelyn Bell Burnell, University of Oxford, “The Last and Next 100 Years in Astronomy“

2013

Don Winget, University of Texas at Austin, “Small Stars in a Large Context:  All Things White Dwarf”

2012

Bob Benjamin, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, “A Visitor’s Guide to the Milky Way Galaxy“

2011

Francis Halzen, University of Wisconsin-Madison / IceCube, “Ice Fishing for Neutrinos“

2010

Giovanni Fazio, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics / Spitzer, “Viewing the Universe with Infrared Eyes:  the Spitzer Space Telescope“

2009

Hal Levison, Southwest Research Institute, “What Planets Are and How they Form“

2008

Neil Gehrels, NASA Goddard / Swift Mission, “Black Holes:  From Einstein to Gamma Ray Bursts“

2007

Michael Turner, University of Chicago, “The Dark Side of the Universe“

2006

Scott Ransom, NRAO-Charlottesville, “The Stellar Undead“

2005

Jeff Hester, Arizona State University, “From the Big Bang to Big Brains:  the Evolution of Structure in the Universe“

2004

Paul Butler, Carnegie Institute, “Extrasolar Planets:  a First Reconnaissance“

2003

Prasun Desai, NASA Langley, “Mars Exploration in the Coming Decade“

2002

Steve Murray, Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics / Chandra, “X-ray Astronomy Comes of Age:  the Chandra x-ray Observatory View of the Cosmos“

2001

Jay Bergstralh, NASA Langley, “The Galilean Satellites of Jupiter“

2000

Virginia Trimble, Univ. Cal-Irvine / Univ. Maryland, “Cosmology:  Man’s Place in the Universe“

1999

Robert Kirshner, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, “The Universe:  Big, Old, and Accelerating“

1998

John Wood, NASA Goddard, “Resolution:  Latest Results from the Hubble Space Telescope“

1997

Bruce Carney, UNC-Chapel Hill, “How Old is Our Universe?“