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Congratulations to our STScI colleague Rick White, who was recently named an American Astronomical Society (AAS) 2025 Fellow! 

The AAS is a major international organization of professional astronomers, astronomy educators, and amateur astronomers. In January, it honored 24 members for extraordinary achievement and service by naming them AAS Fellows — a recognition bestowed on less than 0.5% of AAS’s membership each year. AAS fellows are selected for original research and publications, innovative contributions to astronomical techniques or instrumentation, significant contributions to education and public outreach, and noteworthy service to astronomy and to the society itself.

Rick was honored by AAS for a wide-ranging and creative program of astronomical research, including the execution of the Very Large Array (VLA) Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty-cm (FIRST) survey, the development of advanced data analysis algorithms, the facilitation of community migration to the Python programming language, and advocacy for the development of robust archives to preserve astronomical scientific productivity.
An astrophysicist, Rick has been with STScI since 1982, participating in various leadership, research, and functional roles. Prior to the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, he served as the only instrument scientist on the High Speed Photometer, one of Hubble’s four original instruments. After launch, he worked on algorithms for restoring the aberrated Hubble images. He also developed image compression algorithms, including the wavelet-based Hcompress algorithm used for the Digitized Sky Survey. 

He developed the compression algorithms that are used within FITS files and also created the algorithm used onboard in Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). He was head of the Science Software Group that developed data analysis software, during which time he helped write the PyRAF data analysis software. This played a large role in helping move astronomical analysis to Python by allowing the easy use of IRAF tasks from within the programming language. He was a Department Head for the Engineering and Software Services division.

After a sabbatical as part of the ACS science team, Rick returned to STScI as the Archive Branch chief. Since 2004 he has worked in the STScI archive, where he served as the Principal Investigator for the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) for 10 years. He has helped create and lead both the Hubble Legacy Archive project and the Hubble Source Catalog project, which are his major ongoing focus.

He has been involved many areas of astrophysics, including theory, observation, data analysis, and data science. His fields of research range from the closest star (Proxima Cen) to the then-most-distant-known quasar at a redshift of 6.4. His experience includes supernova remnants, the interstellar medium, galaxy formation, and stellar winds. He has worked on observations from the radio to gamma rays and was one of the leaders in the FIRST survey, the first high-resolution radio survey of the sky. He also led the project to integrate the Pan-STARRS1 survey into the MAST archive.

Rick has co-authored more than 550 papers, which have received more than 33,000 citations. 

Read the full announcement of 2025 AAS Fellows.