Alan Boss

Alan Boss is a research staff member at the Carnegie Institution's

Department of Terrestrial Magnetism in northwest Washington, D.C.

Boss received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California,

Santa Barbara, in 1979. He spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at

NASA's Ames Reseach Center in California before joining the staff of

DTM in 1981. Boss's theoretical research focuses on using three dimensional

hydrodynamics codes to model the formation of stars and planetary systems.

Boss has proposed an alternative means for forming the gas and ice giant

planets of our Solar System and in extrasolar planetary systems, a scenario

that is much faster than the conventional mechanism. He is a member of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a Fellow of the American

Association for the Advancement of Science, the Meteoritical

Society, and the American Geophysical Union. Boss was the founding chair

of the International Astronomical Union's Working Group on Extrasolar

Planets. He has been helping NASA plan its search for extrasolar planets

since 1988 and continues to be active in helping to guide NASA's

efforts. Boss leads a ground-based astrometric planet search effort

at Carnegie's Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. He has published two

books about the search for planets outside the Solar System, "Looking

for Earths: The Race to Find New Solar Systems" in 1998, and "The

Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets" in 2009. He is currently

the chair of NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Technology Assessment Committee

(TAC), the chair of the WFIRST/AFTA Coronagraph TAC, and the chair of the

WFIRST/AFTA IR Detector TAC.