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What Are Astronomers Doing?
Ted von Hippel
"I always wanted to be a scientist." 
Ted von Hippel is a research scientist at McDonald Observatory who enjoys skiing, hiking, and nature photography.
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Ted von Hippel was born of Austrian and German parents, both of whom were physicians and refugees of World War II. They moved to Alaska with Ted when he was two years old, where they raised him and his three siblings.
"I always wanted to be a scientist," Ted says, but he only later became interested in astronomy. He now invests long hours in teaching others to be sound scientists. In fact, teaching others is one of the reasons that Ted became involved in astronomy.
Ted studied physics at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire where he enjoyed his studies and hiking in the Appalachian Mountains of the area. Upon graduation, he worked for two years in the high-tech industry of Boston before moving to the University of Michigan where he earned his astronomy doctorate in 1991. For the next three years, he held a postdoctoral position at Cambridge University in Great Britain. He spent the following four years as the resident scientist for the WIYN telescope, working for the University of Wisconsin on-site at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. Ted has also been a staff astronomer at Gemini Observatory in Hawaii and research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin.
Ted's research interests are deep and wide. He has studied the formation of massive stars in spiral galaxies, brown dwarfs in the Praesepe cluster, the evolution of white dwarfs, and the glow from gamma-ray bursts -- cosmic explosions seen across the universe.
Ted von Hippel
Assistant Professor, Siena College
Ph.D., Astronomy, University of Michigan
A.B., Physics, Dartmouth College
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