Robert Schommer
| Robert A. Schommer | |
|---|---|
Robert A. Schommer
|
|
| Born |
December 9, 1946 Chicago, United States |
| Died | December 12, 2001 (aged 55) La Serena, Chile Suicide |
| Residence | United States, Chile |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Astronomy, astrophysics |
| Alma mater | University of Washington |
Robert A. Schommer (December 9, 1946 – December 12, 2001) was an American observational astronomer. He was a professor at Rutgers University and later a project scientist for the U.S. office of the Gemini Observatory Project at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile. He was known for his wide range of research interests, from stellar populations to cosmology.
Robert Schommer was born in Chicago, Illinois to Harvey and Bea Schommer. He received a B.A. in Physics 1970 from the University of Chicago in 1970 and a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Washington in 1977, where he continued for one year as instructor. Following two years in seminary college in Chicago, he held postdoctoral positions at Caltech (Chaim Weizmann Fellow), the Hale Observatories, the University of Chicago, and Cambridge University (NATO Postdoctoral Fellow) before joining the Department of Physics at the State University of New Jersey. He became increasingly unhappy with the Department's unwillingness to support astronomy, and in 1990 he moved to CTIO in Chile where he remained until his death in 2001.
Schommer carried out some of the first CCD imaging studies of Large Magellanic Cloud star clusters, published in a paper on what is now called the "short distance" to the LMC. His work on star clusters in the Magellanic Clouds and the galaxy M33 were fundamental in providing a basis for our understanding of the chemical histories of those galaxies.
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