George Helou

George Helou is Research Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, CA. He served as Executive Director of IPAC, an Astronomy Center at Caltech, for over twenty years, overseeing science operations for a dozen space telescopes, ground-based surveys and major astronomical archives. He was also active in science advocacy, design and planning for space missions.

Helou's research has ranged from interstellar communications to cosmology, with an abiding interest in understanding galaxies, the formation of stars out of gas and dust, and the evolution of the first generation of galaxies and quasars into today's universe. He has discovered some basic properties of galaxies, mostly relating to their infrared and radio emission behavior, and identified the physics underlying these properties. His more recent foray into time-domain astronomy and Solar System objects led to the discovery of ꞌAylóꞌchaxnim, the first asteroid whose orbit is entirely confined within the orbit of Venus.

Helou was born and educated in Lebanon, graduating from the American University of Beirut with a BSc in Physics with High Distinction, and a Teaching Diploma in Science Education. He earned a PhD in Astrophysics and Radio Science from Cornell University where he studied with Frank Drake, Carl Sagan and Ed Salpeter. His publications in professional journals run to more than 350 articles cited about 78,000 times. He has lectured at over fifty international conferences and held invited positions at European Universities including Florence, Leiden and Paris. He has delivered science public lectures in Pasadena, Los Angeles, New York, Dubai, Tokyo and Beirut.

His awards include the Gruber Cosmology Prize (2018), the AUB Doctorate of Humane Letters Honoris Causa (2018), the Kuwait Prize in Basic Sciences – Physics (2016) and the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal (2022). He served as President of the Academy of Sciences of Lebanon from 2014 to 2018 and was elected a Fellow of the American Astronomical Society in 2022.