Physicists and astronomers

Roberto Morandotti

Roberto Morandotti is a full professor at INRS in Montreal who works in integrated and quantum photonics, known for the first chip-based generation of complex entangled quantum states of light.

Robin M. Canup

Robin M. Canup is an American planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder known for simulations showing a single Mars-sized giant impact could have formed the Moon.

Sep 20, 2026

Robin M. Hochstrasser (1931–2013) was a Scottish-born physical chemist who spent fifty years at the University of Pennsylvania, where he pioneered ultrafast and two-dimensional infrared spectroscopy applied to chemistry and biology.

Robin Santra

Robin Santra is a German-based theoretical physicist who studies how x rays and intense lasers interact with atoms and molecules, and heads the CFEL Theory Division at DESY in Hamburg.

Rochus E. Vogt

Rochus E. Vogt, known as Robbie, is a Caltech physicist and the first director of the LIGO project from 1987 to 1994, where he led the 1989 construction proposal that won funding.

Rocio Borrego-Varillas

Rocío Borrego-Varillas is a Spanish physicist and senior researcher at IFN-CNR in Milan who leads attosecond molecular laboratories; her 2022 attosecond spectroscopy review was cited by the 2023 Nobel Committee for Physics.

Roderich Moessner

Roderich Moessner is a German theoretical condensed matter physicist, director at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden since 2007.

Rodney Baxter

Rodney Baxter (1940–2025) was an Australian mathematical physicist who exactly solved major lattice models in statistical mechanics and gave his name to the Yang–Baxter equation.

Rodney L. Cool

Rodney L. Cool was an American experimental particle physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory whose measurements helped establish the quark as a building block of protons and neutrons.

Sep 20, 2026

Rodney S. Ruoff

Rodney S. Ruoff, also known as Rodney Ruoff, is a physical chemist and graphene researcher who directs the IBS Center for Multidimensional Carbon Materials at UNIST in South Korea.

Rodney S. Tucker

Rodney S. Tucker is an Australian electrical engineer and Laureate Professor Emeritus at the University of Melbourne, known for work on optical networking and telecommunications energy efficiency.

Rodrigo Ibata

Rodrigo Ibata is a British-trained astronomer and CNRS research director at Strasbourg, known for discovering the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy in 1994 and sharing the 2026 Kavli Prize in Astrophysics.

Roel Aaij

Roel Aaij is a Dutch particle physicist, senior scientific staff at Nikhef in Amsterdam since 2018, known for the 2015 pentaquark observation and leading LHCb's GPU-based trigger Allen.

Roger A. Chevalier

Roger A. Chevalier is a theoretical astrophysicist, the W. H. Vanderbilt Professor of Astronomy at the University of Virginia since 1990, known for his work on supernovae.

Roger Angel

Roger Angel, born 1941, is an astronomer and optical scientist at the University of Arizona known for casting lightweight honeycomb mirrors for the world's largest telescopes.

Roger Bacon (American physicist)

Roger Bacon was an American physicist who discovered graphite whiskers at Union Carbide's Parma Technical Center in 1958, opening the way to high-performance carbon fibers and earning the 2004 Benjamin Franklin Medal.

Roger Balian

Roger Balian, born in Lyon in 1933, is a French theoretical physicist at the CEA Saclay known for statistical mechanics, the information-theoretic interpretation of entropy, and quantum measurement.

Roger Blandford

Roger Blandford, born in England in 1949, is a British theoretical astrophysicist at Stanford known for the Blandford–Znajek process, which explains how spinning black holes power relativistic jets.

Roger Bowley

Roger Bowley is a physicist and emeritus professor at the University of Nottingham, co-author of Introductory Statistical Mechanics and a regular scientist on the Sixty Symbols YouTube channel.

Roger Dashen

Roger Dashen (1938–1995) was an American theoretical particle physicist known for chiral symmetry and current algebra, a quantum theory of solitons, and lattice gauge theory.

Roger Hall Stolen

Roger Hall Stolen is an American physicist and electrical engineer known for pioneering fiber nonlinear optics, first observing optical solitons, and inventing polarization preserving fiber.

Roger K. Ulrich

Roger K. Ulrich is an American astrophysicist and professor emeritus at UCLA whose 1970 work on solar oscillations founded helioseismology, earning him the 2022 Kavli Prize in astrophysics.

Roger Lynds

Clarence Roger Lynds (1928–2023) was an American observational astronomer at Kitt Peak National Observatory who named the Lyman-alpha forest, co-discovered gravitational arcs, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1974.

Roger Penrose

Roger Penrose is a British mathematical physicist at Oxford who won half of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for showing black hole formation follows from general relativity.

Roger Romani

Roger W. Romani is a Stanford astrophysicist working on neutron stars, black holes, and gamma-ray pulsars, known for millisecond pulsar discoveries and weighing neutron stars through their evaporating companions.

Rohit Kulkarni

Rohit N. Kulkarni is a diabetes researcher who heads Islet Cell and Regenerative Biology at Joslin Diabetes Center and is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Roland R. Netz

Roland R. Netz is a theoretical physicist who has been a full professor at the Free University Berlin since 2011, working on soft matter, charged polymers, and water at interfaces.

Rolf Hagedorn

Rolf Hagedorn (1919–2003) was a German theoretical physicist at CERN who found a limiting temperature in hadronic collisions, about 150 MeV, and built the statistical bootstrap model behind it.

Rolf Landauer

Rolf Landauer (1927–1999) was a German-born American physicist at IBM who established the thermodynamics of information and formulated Landauer's principle on the energy cost of erasing information.