Jeremiah P. Ostriker

Jeremiah Paul "Jerry" Ostriker (born April 13, 1937) is an American astrophysicist and a professor of astronomy at Columbia University and is the Charles A. Young Professor Emeritus at Princeton, where he also continues as a senior research scholar. Ostriker has also served as a university administrator as Provost of Princeton University. He is known for his significant contributions to the fields of theoretical astrophysics, galaxy formation and evolution, black holes, cosmology, dark matter, and dark energy.

Education
The son of a teacher and a businessman, Ostriker was born and raised in Manhattan, New York City. He attended the Fieldston School.

Ostriker earned his A.B. in Physics and Chemistry from Harvard University in 1959. He then pursued his graduate studies, earning his Ph.D. in Astrophysics from the University of Chicago in 1964. Later, he was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Science degree from the University of Chicago in 1992 and another from Princeton University in 2017. Additionally, he obtained a Master of Arts degree from the University of Cambridge in England in 2002.

Career and research
After earning his Ph.D. at Chicago, he conducted post-doctoral work at the University of Cambridge. From 1971 to 1995, Ostriker was a professor at Princeton, and served as Provost there from 1995 to 2001. After stepping down as provost, Ostriker spent three years as the Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. He then returned to Princeton full time in 2005 and served as director of the Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering (PICSiE). Since 2008, he has held the position of treasurer of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Following Lyman Spitzer's retirement, Ostriker was appointed the Charles A. Young Chair on the Class of 1890 Foundation. He continues as a senior research scholar at Princeton and became a professor of astronomy at Columbia in 2012.

Ostriker has been very influential in advancing the theory that most of the mass in the universe is not visible at all, but consists of dark matter. His research has also focused on the interstellar medium, galaxy evolution, cosmology and black holes. On June 20, 2013 Ostriker was given the White House Champions of Change Award for his role in initiating the Sloan Digital Sky Survey project, which makes all of its astronomical data sets available publicly on the Internet Ostriker played a pivotal role in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), advocating for open public access to its data.

Ostriker is also known for the Ostriker–Peebles criterion, relating to the stability of galactic formation.

Research
Before the early 1970s, astronomers generally assumed that the mass in galaxies was primarily composed of visible stars. Ostriker challenged this assumption by proposing a radical model (first proposed by Fritz Zwicky many years earlier) in which galaxies are surrounded by a much larger halo of dark matter, expanding the scale and mass of galaxies. This theory, despite initial skepticism, has been confirmed by observations, marking a major revision in the understanding of galaxies since Shapley's work in the early 1900s.

His research also delved into the dynamics of the gaseous interstellar medium, revealing its interactions akin to those between living organisms and their environment. By analyzing these interactions, Ostriker demonstrated how energy inputs from stellar processes shape the interstellar medium, influencing star formation rates and the evolution of galaxies. His work extended to the intergalactic medium, shedding light on phenomena such as intergalactic gas clouds and their role in galaxy formation.

Ostriker contributed to the development of numerical simulations of the early universe's evolution and structure formation. His collaboration with Paul Bode on N-body simulations helped establish the Lambda cold dark matter model as the standard cosmological model. Additionally, his work with Ren-Yue Cen addressed the formation of galaxies and the Missing baryon problem, revealing the distribution of ordinary chemical elements in intergalactic gas.

Ostriker played a role in developing algorithms for large-scale simulations, including the Tree Particle Mesh ("TPM") algorithm used in the Millennium Simulation. Throughout his career, Ostriker has supervised and collaborated with numerous researchers and graduate students, resulting in over 500 scientific publications.

Publications
As of June 2024, Ostriker's articles have been cited over 112057 times and he has an h-index of 144 (130 papers with at least 130 citations) according to Google Scholar including:



Books

 * 1) Heart of Darkness: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Invisible Universe by Jeremiah P. Ostriker and Simon Mitton
 * 2) Unsolved Problems in Astrophysics by John Bahcall and Jeremiah P. Ostriker
 * 3) Dreams, Stars, and Electrons by Lyman S. Spitzer Jr. and Jeremiah P. Ostriker
 * 4) Selected Works of Yakov Borisovich Zeldovich, Volume II: Particles, Nuclei, and the Universe by Yakov Borisovich Zeldovich and Jeremiah P. Ostriker
 * 5) Formation of Structure in the Universe by Avishai Dekel and Jeremiah P. Ostriker
 * 6) Development of Large Scale Structure in the Universe by Jeremiah P. Ostriker

Awards and honors
Ostriker has won numerous awards and honors including:


 * Membership of the National Academy of Sciences (1974)
 * Membership of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1975)
 * Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) (1972)
 * Henry Norris Russell Lectureship of the AAS (1980)
 * INSA-Vainu Bappu Memorial Award (1993)
 * Membership of the American Philosophical Society (1994)
 * Foreign membership of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (1999)
 * Karl Schwarzschild Medal (1999)
 * National Medal of Science by U.S. President Bill Clinton (2000)
 * Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement (2001)
 * Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (2004)
 * Elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 2007
 * Bruce Medal (2011)
 * James Craig Watson Medal (2012)
 * White House Champion of Change (2013)
 * Gruber Prize in Cosmology (2015)
 * Elected a Legacy Fellow of the American Astronomical Society in 2020.

Personal life
Ostriker married noted poet and essayist Alicia Ostriker (née Suskin) in 1959. Together they have three adult children: Rebecca, Eve, and Gabriel. Like her father, Eve became an astrophysics professor at Princeton University, in 2012, the same year as her father's retirement. Jeremiah and Alicia Ostriker have been residents of Princeton, New Jersey.