Roger Angel, founder and Director of University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory Mirror Laboratory and Regents’ Professor of Astronomy and Optical Sciences, led a technological renaissance in telescope mirror making. Angel pioneered ways to find and study Earth-like planets of other stars.
Angel received grants from Research Corporation in 1970 for “the search for magnetic fields in white dwarf stars” and in 1971 for “investigation of magnetic white dwarfs.” In 2010, he was awarded the Kavli Prize, given by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters to scientists whose discoveries have dramatically expanded human understanding in the fields of astrophysics, nanoscience and neuroscience.
Angel’s Kavli Award in astrophysics, shared with Jerry E. Nelson, professor of astronomy at University of California, Santa Cruz, and Raymond N. Wilson, senior physicist at the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany, was specifically “for their contributions to the development of giant telescopes.”