Tod R. Lauer

Tod R. Lauer
Born	1957 Ohio
Residence	Arizona, United States
Nationality	USA
Citizenship	United States
Alma mater	Caltech UC Santa Cruz
Awards	NASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement (1992)
Scientific career
Fields	Astronomy
Institutions	NOAO Princeton University

Tod R. Lauer (born 1957) is an American astronomer on the research staff of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory. He was a member of the Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field and Planetary Camera team, and is a founding member of the Nuker Team. His research interests includes observational searches for massive black holes in the centers of galaxies, the structure of elliptical galaxies, stellar populations, large-scale structure of the universe, and astronomical image processing. He was the Principal Investigator of the Destiny JDEM concept study, one of the precursors to the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope mission. Asteroid 3135 Lauer is named for him. He appears in an episode of the documentary series Naked Science. He joined the New Horizons Pluto team in order to apply his extensive experience with deep space imaging to the New Horizons data, yielding significantly clearer and mathematically accurate images of Pluto and Charon.