Br. Guy Consolmagno, S.J

Brother Guy Consolmagno, S.J. is the Director of the Vatican Observatory and President of the Vatican Observatory Foundation. A native of Detroit, Michigan, he
earned undergraduate and masters’ degrees from MIT, and a Ph. D. in Planetary Science from the University of Arizona. He was a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard and MIT, served in the US Peace Corps (Kenya), and taught university physics at Lafayette College before entering the Jesuits in 1989. At the Vatican Observatory since 1993, Pope Francis appointed Dr. Consolmagno director of the Observatory in 2015. Br. Guy’s research explores connections between meteorites, asteroids, and the evolution of small solar system bodies. He has observed Kuiper Belt objects with the Vatican’s 1.8  telescope in Arizona, and measured of meteorite physical properties to understand asteroid origins and structure. Along with more than 250 scientific publications, he is the author of
a dozen popular books including Turn Left at Orion (with Dan Davis), and Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial? (with Paul Mueller). He has also hosted science programs for BBC Radio 4, been interviewed in numerous documentary films, appeared on The Colbert Report, and for twenty years he has written a monthly science column for the British Catholic magazine, The Tablet. In 2000, the IAU named an asteroid, 4597 Consolmagno, in recognition of his work. In 2014 he received the Carl Sagan Medal from the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Sciences for excellence in public communication in planetary sciences.