Claire Max earns astronomical award for providing a clearer view of planets

Claire Max, a longtime astrophysicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a faculty member at UC Santa Cruz, has earned the Joseph Weber Award for Astronomical Instrumentation from the American Astronomical Society for her work in adaptive optics (AO).

Max co-invented sodium laser guide star adaptive optics and shepherded AO, which takes the "twinkle" out of starlight, from its roots in classified space surveillance to its prominence today as an essential technology on large telescopes. Her leadership has transformed how astronomers observe by making near-diffraction-limited imaging possible on large ground-based telescopes, thus opening new fields of discovery including resolving stars and gas near supermassive black holes and studying extrasolar planets.

Max received the award at the American Astronomical Society's 225th bi-annual meeting.

Throughout her career, Max has made important contributions to the separate fields of plasma physics and astrophysics, and she is considered a central figure in the field of AO for ground-based telescopes. Her work on laser guide stars, which are used with AO to correct the blurring of telescopic imagery caused by turbulence in the atmosphere, has resulted in an ongoing revolution in ground-based astronomy.

Max is one of the co-inventors of the sodium laser guide star, and she is a leader in implementing these new artificial guide stars at astronomical observatories. Use of laser guide stars went on to bear infrared images and spectra of storms on Neptune, hydrocarbon oceans and ice continents on Titan, and black holes in the core of our own Milky Way and in the center of nearby galaxies.

Max led a group that built the AO system and sodium laser guide star for Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton, and designed the laser beacon and AO system for the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, in collaboration with Keck Observatory staff. She also was instrumental in the creation of the newly formed Center for Adaptive Optics (CAO) headquartered at UC Santa Cruz.

Max joined the Laboratory in 1974 as part of a new group formed to understand the plasma physics of laser fusion. In the early 1980s, Max's career branched out widely. She became the founding director of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, a position she held for nearly a decade. She also became the first female member of the elite JASON group of scientific advisers to the Department of Defense.

Max has earned many awards during her career, including the Department of Energy's prestigious E.O. Lawrence Award in 2004. In 2003, she was inducted into the Alameda County Women’s Hall of Fame. In 2002, she was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for her astrophysics research and also a fellow of the American Physical Society and SPIE. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2008.

She currently works at UC Santa Cruz, where she is a professor and interim director of the CAO.