AstroAssembly 2024

Mr. Norwood brings with him a lifetime of real world experience as the owner/entrepreneur of Camera Concepts and Telescope Solutions, a top retailer of Photographic and Astronomical Products based on Long Island New York, since 1985. In addition to being a veteran amateur astronomer for the past 30 years, he is considered a leading expert and a top telescope repair technician throughout the astronomical community. In addition, his experience as a guest lecturer has encompassed a wide variety of subjects including not only astronomy and photography but also musicology. Professor Norwood currently holds a Master's degree in Music History and Theory and teaches regularly at both the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College and as an adjunct professor at St. John's University in New York. As such, he has made significant contributions to the vital fields of musicology and higher education. He is a tenacious and enthusiastic individual who is an active member of many non-profit organizations which are dedicated to the advancement of education in a wide variety of fields.

Dr. Edward Guimont is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Bristol Community College in Fall River, Massachusetts. He is a historian of colonialism and science, as well as a scholar on Providence weird fiction author H. P. Lovecraft. With Horace Smith, he is coauthor of the monograph When the Stars Are Right: H. P. Lovecraft and Astronomy (Hippocampus Press, 2023). He is currently finishing writing his next book, The Power of the Flat Earth Idea, for Palgrave Macmillan. 

Prof. Doug Gobeille is a teaching professor and has been at URI for almost a decade. His primary research focuses on the study of supermassive black holes, specifically their production of active galactic nuclei and their evolution through cosmological time. This work focuses on studying the morphology of radio loud quasars using the Very Large Array (VLA) in Socorro, NM. Additionally, observations are made with the SWIFT, Chandra, XMM Newton, and Fermi space telescopes to investigate the energy production mechanisms for x-rays and gamma-rays in high redshift quasar jets. This research builds on his undergraduate work with Dr. Leslie Brown at Connecticut College, and graduate studies with Dr. John Wardle at Brandeis University.

At URI Prof Gobeille focuses on life, humanity, and their place in the universe. This is accomplished through incorporating modern observations and publications into introductory classroom investigations of life in the universe. Additionally, a separate team-taught course investigates science in science fiction media with a focus on film and television. Prof. Gobeille works with other physics faculty in building the larger astronomy and astrophysics facet of URI’s Physics Department, including undergraduate research, upper level courses, and astrophotography.

Pete’s research focuses on impact cratering processes as revealed by laboratory impact experiments, the planetary surface record, and terrestrial ground truth.  His laboratory research has covered a wide range of topics: atmospheric effects on ejecta emplacement, impactor survival, secondary impact processes, antipodal shock effects, high-speed spectroscopy of impact vapor/plasma, impact angle effects (shock propagation, vaporization, target damage, and flow-field evolution), projectile fate after impacts, and crater-scaling relations.  Of particular recent interest has addressed the origin of fluidized ejecta and blast winds around craters on Mars.  Such basic research led to participation in numerous NASA planetary missions including Magellan, Deep Impact, Stardust-NExT, EPOXI, and LCROSS.   He cut his teeth, so to speak, on basic lunar research: floor-fractured craters, beginning/end of volcanism, lunar swirl generation, polar volatile evolution, assessment of the size of impactors, evidence for ongoing lunar tectonic activity, and what caused the difference between the lunar nearside and farside.  The last study proposed that a giant impact on the far side actually caused the concentration of maria on the nearside, i.e., the Man in the Moon.  On Earth, his research has included the discovery of 8 impacts in Argentina, documentation of a witnessed crater-forming impact in Peru in 2007, and studying the effects of a giant cometary airblast across the Atacama Desert, Chile only about 11,500 years ago.  He has published more than 200 papers and authored a book called Moon Morphology.  Most recently, he contributed a chapter to a new book that shares stories about growing up during the dawn of the Space Age (The Space Age Generation).

He received his BA from Carleton College (Northfield, MN) and PhD from the U. Texas-Austin.  He subsequently went to NASA Ames as an NRC postdoctoral researcher, then Staff Scientist at LPI (1976-1984), and finally Professor at Brown University, becoming Emeritus in 2014.  His students have gone to become well-respected scientists across the world.  He served as the Science Coordinator for the NASA Ames Vertical Gun Range from 1980 to 2014 and was the Principle Investigator and Director of both the NASA Rhode Island Space Grant program (1992-2022) and the Northeast Planetary Data Center at Brown (1984-2022).  He has been awarded the Distinguished Scientist Award (Hypervelocity Impact Society), Barringer Medal (Meteoritical Society), Medal of Achievement (National Academy of Sciences of Argentina), Distinguished Alumnae Achievement award (Carleton College), and the G. K. Gilbert Award (Geological Society of America). Asteroid 6952 is named “PeteSchultz.”