Jeremiah P. Ostriker

Jeremiah Paul Ostriker
Born	April 13, 1937
Institutions	Columbia University Princeton University University of Cambridge
Alma mater	Harvard University University of Chicago
Doctoral advisor	Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Notable awards	Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy (1972) National Medal of Science (2000) Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (2004) Bruce Medal (2011)

Jeremiah (Jerry) Paul Ostriker (born 1937) is an astrophysicist and a professor of astronomy at Columbia University. He received his B.A. from Harvard, his Ph.D at the University of Chicago, and then carried out post-doctoral work at the University of Cambridge. From 1971 to 1995, Ostriker was a professor at Princeton, and served as Provost there from 1995 to 2001. From 2001 to 2003, he was appointed as Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge. He then returned to Princeton as the Charles Young Professor of Astronomy. He moved to Columbia in 2012.

Ostriker has been very influential in advancing the theory that most of the mass in the universe is not visible at all, but consists of dark matter. His research has also focused on the interstellar medium, galaxy evolution, cosmology and black holes.

As of December 2012, Ostriker's articles have been cited over 47,000 times and he has an h-index of 105 (105 papers with at least 105 citations) according to the NASA Astrophysics Data System.

He married noted poet and essayist Alicia Ostriker in 1959.

Recent publications

• New Light on Dark Matter, Science, 300, pp 1909–1914 (2003)
• The Probability Distribution Function of Light in the Universe: Results from Hydrodynamic Simulations, Astrophysical Journal 597, 1 (2003)
• Cosmic Mach Number as a Function of Overdensity and Galaxy Age, Astrophysical Journal, 553, 513 (2001)
• Collisional Dark Matter and the Origin of Massive Black Holes, Physical Review Letters, 84, 5258-5260 (2000).
• Hydrodynamics of Accretion onto Black Holes, Adv. Space Res., 7, 951-960 (1998).

Awards

• Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) (1972)
• Henry Norris Russell Lectureship of the AAS (1980)
• National Medal of Science by U.S. President Bill Clinton (2000)
• Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (2004)
• Bruce Medal (2011)