Biographical Information: Charles Dennison Dermer
Chuck Dermer is an astrophysicist in the High Energy Space Environment Branch of the Naval Research Laboratory's Space Science Division. His interests cover many areas of astrophysics, including cosmic rays, the multiwavelength astronomy of blazars, the physics of neutron stars and black holes, gamma-ray bursts, merging clusters of galaxies, and solar flares. Dr. Dermer was an Interdisciplinary Scientist on the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) project and is now a full collaboration member. He does not have a Wikipedia entry, so this will have to do.
He is a Cornhusker by accident of birth, graduating from Harvey Mudd College in 1977 and receiving his PhD degree from UCSD in 1984 under the supervision of Professor Robert J. Gould. He subsequently held postdoctoral and research scientist positions at NASA/GSFC, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory, and Rice University, before joining the Naval Research Laboratory in 1992. He has served as an executive committee member in the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the AAS, and as an executive committee member-at-large in the Division of Astrophysics of the American Physical Society. He was chair of the Division of Astrophysics of the American Physical Society in 2001, serving the four-year chair sequence from 1999 to 2003, and recently finished a four-year term as Division Councilor. Dr. Dermer was a member of the Structure and Evolution of the Universe Subcommittee, a NASA advisory body, which under the direction of Sterl Phinney, produced the Beyond Einstein roadmap that was made defunct by President Geo. W. Bush's Vision for Space Exploration. (Meeting- by meeting- description of the dismantlement of this effort can be found here.) He recently completed a membership on the VERITAS External Oversight Committee. Dr. Dermer has authored and co-authored over 200 technical papers.
Some of his accomplishments include a model for gamma-ray emission from pulsars based on Compton scattering in strong magnetic fields (with Steve Sturner); a widely used secondary nuclear production model for pion-decay radiations in cosmic-ray interactions and (with Reuven Ramaty and Ron Murphy) Solar flares; a model for high-energy blazar jet radiation when jet electrons Compton scatter photons originating from outside the jet (with Prof. Reinhard Schlickeiser, now at Bochum U.), yielding new beaming statistics for these sources; detailed studies of the fireball/blast wave model and its application to gamma-ray bursts and blazars (with Drs. J. Chiang, SLAC, and M. Böttcher, Ohio U.); and, with Prof. Armen Atoyan (Concordia University, Montreal), a model of high-energy cosmic rays accelerated by GRB blast waves from energies above the knee to the highest energies.
With Armen Atoyan, Dermer developed the neutral-beam model for black hole jet sources. In this scenario, neutral beams of neutrons, gamma rays, and neutrinos carry energy and momentum from black-hole jet sources, explaining the origin of ultra-high energy cosmic rays and a wide variety of phenomena in Gamma Ray Burst and blazar studies, including the appearance of knots in extended X-ray jets observed with Chandra, and the cosmic-ray ankle and cutoff. His recent research, with Drs. Justin Finke and Soeb Razzaque, focuses on electromagnetic signatures of ultra-high energy cosmic rays in GRBs, and how they can be identified in data taken with the Fermi Gamma ray Space Telescope.With Professor Govind Menon of Troy University, Dermer recently completed a monograph about black holes and their radiations, entitled "High Energy Radiation from Black Holes," published December, 2009 by Princeton University Press. The thesis of this book is that the highest energy radiations--gamma rays, cosmic rays, and neutrinos--are made by black-hole jets. This book gives the theory that explains how this is done.
Charles Dermer was awarded the 2009 Naval Research Laboratory E. O. Hulburt Annual Science Award for "contributions to Gamma-Ray Astronomy and Cosmic-Ray Astrophysics, and our understanding of Solar and Astrophysical sources of high-energy radiation."Astrophysics of Annihilation Radiation: Tribute to Reuven Ramaty (Powerpoint, 2.4 MB) (My first postdoc was with Reuven Ramaty.)