Panelist Biographies
Dr Steve Allen, Assistant Professor of Physics, Stanford University and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
Dr. Steve Allen is Assistant Professor of Physics at Stanford
University and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), where he
is also a member of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and
Cosmology (KIPAC). He received his Ph.D. in astronomy from the
University of Cambridge in 1994, where he later held a Particle
Physics and Astronomy Research Council Postdoctoral Research
Fellowship, a Charles and Katharine Darwin Research Fellowship from
Darwin College, and a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. He
moved to Stanford University and SLAC to take up a joint faculty
appointment in January 2005. His main scientific interests are galaxy
clusters, in particular their X-ray properties, the interactions
between active galactic nuclei and their environments, and the use of
galaxy clusters as cosmological probes.
Dr. Allen is currently leading projects to measure the distributions
of dark and luminous matter in galaxy clusters, and to use these
measurements, in combination with other astronomical data, to
determine cosmological parameters and study the nature of dark matter
and dark energy in the Universe.
Dr. Chris Reynolds, Associate Professor of Astronomy at
the University of Maryland, College Park 
Dr. Christopher Reynolds is an Associate Professor of Astronomy at
the University of Maryland, College Park. He received his Ph.D. in
Astronomy from the University of Cambridge (UK) in 1996, after which
he moved to the University of Colorado at Boulder as a Postdoctoral
Researcher and then a Hubble Fellow. He was appointed onto the
faculty at the University of Maryland in 2001 where he has since
maintained a research group working on the properties and environment
impact of accreting black holes. Dr. Reynolds won the Helen B. Warner
Prize for 2005 from the American Astronomical Society in recognition of
his work on black hole astrophysics.
Dr. Kim Weaver, Associate Director for Science of the Exploration of the Universe Division, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center 
Dr. Kim Weaver is an astrophysicist and the Associate Director for
Science for the Exploration of the Universe Division at Goddard Space
Flight Center. She began studying astronomy at the University of
Maryland and discovered the world of High-Energy Astrophysics as a
graduate researcher at NASA. After graduating with a Ph.D., she
moved to Penn State University and then to Johns Hopkins University,
where she is currently affiliated as an adjunct Associate Professor.
In 1996, Dr. Weaver won a NASA Presidential Early Career Award to
pursue research in extragalactic astronomy. In 1998, she returned
to Goddard to continue her career as an x-ray astrophysicist. She
has also served as a Program Scientist and Press Liaison for space
science missions within the Universe Division at NASA Headquarters.
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