Tom Statler is an astrophysicist, and has always been fascinated by
the way things move in the universe. He was an undergraduate at the
University of California at Berkeley and earned a Ph.D. from
Princeton University. He held a Miller Research Fellowship at UC
Berkeley, a postdoctoral position at the University of Colorado, and
was on the faculty at the University of North Carolina before coming
to Ohio University in 1995 to begin building the astrophysics
program. Statler's research concerns the motions of large
objects-- from the rotations of near-Earth asteroids the size of
shopping malls, to the orbits of stars and the motions of
interstellar gas in elliptical galaxies. He is recognized as one of
the world's experts in determining the three-dimensional distribution
of mass in these galaxies. His work has made use of some of the
premier observing facilities in the world, including the Hubble Space
Telescope and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, as well as theoretical
modeling on computers big and small.
Statler has served as chair of the American Astronomical Society's Division on Dynamical Astronomy from 2005 to 2006. Since Sept 2005, he has been writing bi-weekly columns about science for The Columbus Dispatch.
Statler is also a clarinetist and composer, and was a founding member of The Composer's Cafeteria, an ensemble that performed many concerts of new and experimental music in Berkeley, CA in the 1980s.
Statler received the Jeanette Grasselli-Brown Teaching Award from the College of Arts and Sciences in 2006.
