William Reach (USRA)
Associate Director for Science
wreach@sofia.usra.edu

Bill Reach has been working in infrared astronomy beginning at Cornell University in Jim Houck's lab, working on instrumentation for the Kuiper Airborn Observatory, continuing to University of Calfironia, Berkeley to work with Carl Heiles and get his Ph. D. on interpretation of IRAS observations of the zodiacal light. He moved back across the country to work as a postdoc with Mike Hauser on the Cosmic Background Explorer, then across the Atlantic to work as a postdoc with Jean-Loup Puget and Francois Boulanger on the Infrared Space Observatory (ISO). Bill returned to the US in 1997 to work at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech, where he was leader of the instrument support team for the Infrared Array Camera on the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Head of Science Staff for a while, and then the leader of the Planck group at IPAC, which developed the first compact source catalog from the Planck all-sky survey. Bill moved up to Northern California to work as the Associate Director for Science for SOFIA in 2010.

Bill's research includes comets, interplanetary dust, the diffuse interstellar medium, interstellar dust, dust in other planetary systems, the Magellanic Clouds, and cosmic backgrounds. A complete list of refereed journal articles is here.