Physicists and astronomers

Jonathan Fortney

Jonathan J. Fortney is an American planetary scientist who models planetary atmospheres and interiors, professor and department chair at UC Santa Cruz and director of its Other Worlds Laboratory.

Jonathan Homer Lane

Jonathan Homer Lane (1819–1880) was an American astrophysicist and patent examiner who first treated the Sun mathematically as a gaseous body in his 1870 paper.

Jonathan J. Finley

Jonathan J. Finley, also known as J. J. Finley, is an English physicist who has held the Chair of Semiconductor Quantum Nanosystems at the Technical University of Munich since 2013.

Jonathan Lunine

Jonathan Lunine is an American planetary scientist and Chief Scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory since 2024, known for research on Titan and the outer Solar System.

Jonathan P. Williams

Jonathan P. Williams is an astronomer and professor at the Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii at Manoa, known for submillimeter surveys of planet-forming disks around nearby young stars.

Jonathan Paul Heritage

Jonathan Paul Heritage is an American optical engineer at UC Davis, co-inventor of the wavelength selective switch and elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2019.

Jook Walraven

Jook Walraven is an atomic physicist who, with his supervisor Isaac Silvera, first stabilized spin-polarized atomic hydrogen in 1980, creating the first studied dilute quantum gas.

Joop Schaye

Joop Schaye is an astronomer and full professor of galaxy formation at Leiden Observatory since 2011, who led the EAGLE cosmological simulation and leads the COLIBRE project.

Jörg Reichert

Jörg Reichert is a German physicist who at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics helped demonstrate the stability of femtosecond frequency combs, work named in the 2005 Nobel Prize background.

Jörg Schmiedmayer

Jörg Schmiedmayer is an Austrian experimental physicist and professor at TU Wien, known for developing the atom chip and studying non-equilibrium dynamics of one-dimensional quantum gases.

Sep 20, 2026

Jörg Wrachtrup

Jörg Wrachtrup, born 1961 in Herford, Germany, is a physicist at the University of Stuttgart known for detecting a single molecular spin in 1993 and diamond quantum sensing.

Jorge J. Rocca is an Argentine-born laser physicist and University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University, known for the first table-top soft X-ray laser and elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2024.

Jorge Sahade

Jorge Sahade (1915–2012) was an Argentine astrophysicist known for his work on interacting binary stars and as the first Latin American president of the International Astronomical Union.

Jørgen Christensen-Dalsgaard

Jørgen Christensen-Dalsgaard, born 1950 in Kolding, Denmark, is a Danish astrophysicist at Aarhus University known for pioneering helioseismology, the study of the Sun's interior through its oscillations.

José Enrique Moyal

José Enrique Moyal (1910–1998) was an Australian mathematical physicist, born in Jerusalem, who founded the phase-space formulation of quantum mechanics, source of the Moyal product and bracket.

José Goldemberg

José Goldemberg, born in 1928 in Santo Ângelo, is a Brazilian experimental nuclear physicist who served as Brazil's Minister of Education and championed sugarcane ethanol.

José Ignacio Pascual

José Ignacio Pascual, known as Nacho Pascual, is a Spanish condensed-matter physicist who has been an Ikerbasque Research Professor at CIC nanoGUNE in San Sebastián since 2012.

José Luis Sérsic

José Luis Sérsic (1933–1993) was an Argentine astronomer at the Observatorio Astronómico de Córdoba, a pioneer of Southern Hemisphere extragalactic astronomy known for the Sérsic profile.

José María Maza Sancho

José María Maza Sancho, born in Valparaíso in 1948, is a Chilean astronomer and 1999 National Prize winner whose Calán-Tololo supernova calibration underpinned the discovery of the accelerating universe.

José Nelson Onuchic

José Nelson Onuchic is a Brazilian-born biological physicist at Rice University, known for introducing protein folding funnels and co-directing the NSF Center for Theoretical Biological Physics.

José Wagner Furtado Valle

José Wagner Furtado Valle is a Brazilian-born theoretical particle physicist at CSIC's IFIC in Valencia, best known for the 1982 Schechter–Valle theorem linking neutrinoless double beta decay to neutrino Majorana mass.

Josef Mattauch

Josef Mattauch (1895–1976) was an Austrian physicist who designed the Mattauch–Herzog double-focusing mass spectrograph, formulated the isobar rule, and led the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz.

Josef Meixner

Josef Meixner (1908–1994) was a German theoretical physicist, professor at Aachen from 1942 to 1974, who independently founded nonequilibrium thermodynamics in 1941 and gave his name to Meixner polynomials.

Joseph A. Burns

Joseph A. Burns (1941–2025) was an American planetary scientist and celestial mechanician at Cornell University, known for work on radiation forces, planetary rings, and the Cassini imaging team.

Joseph A. Shaw

Joseph A. Shaw is an American optical remote sensing scientist who won the 1998 PECASE award and directs the Optical Technology Center at Montana State University.

Joseph A. Stroscio

Joseph A. Stroscio, also published as J. A. Stroscio, is an American physicist and NIST Fellow in Maryland known for scanning tunneling microscopy of graphene and 2D quantum materials.

Joseph Checkelsky

Joseph G. Checkelsky is an experimental condensed matter physicist who joined MIT in 2014 and is known for work on magnetism in topological insulators and massive Dirac fermions in the kagome metal Fe3Sn2.

Joseph H. Taylor Jr.

Joseph H. Taylor Jr. (Joseph Hooton Taylor) is an American radio astronomer who shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the first binary pulsar.

Joseph Haines Moore

Joseph Haines Moore (1878–1949) was an American astronomer at Lick Observatory who discovered 64 spectroscopic binaries and compiled the standard 1932 catalog of radial velocities.