Dr. Mark Clampin
Acting SMD Deputy Associate Administrator | NASA Headquarters
Dr. Mark Clampin is the Acting Deputy Associate Administrator in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC, where he provides executive leadership, overall planning, direction, and management of NASA’s $7B science portfolio focused on the scientific exploration of Earth, the Sun, solar system, universe, and biological and physical sciences. He brings ~35 years of leadership in program, project management, and strategic planning, and the development of space-flight hardware for astrophysics research. He fosters partnerships with other government agencies and collaborates with commercial and international partners to leverage synergistic investments and advance NASA science.
Until August 2022, Dr. Clampin was the Director of the Sciences and Exploration Directorate (SED) at the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), where he led the Astrophysics, Solar System, Heliophysics and Earth Science Divisions, together with the high-performance computing office. He previously served as GSFC’s Director of the Astrophysics Science Division and GSFC’s Deputy Director of SED. For ~14 years he was the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Observatory Project Scientist responsible for the development and oversight of Webb’s Observatory Science Requirements.
Prior to joining GSFC, Dr Clampin was the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) Group Lead at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), where he worked on Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Servicing Missions SM1 to SM3B. Dr. Clampin is a Co-Investigator with the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), and the Advanced camera for Surveys (ACS) science team and where he was responsible for the delivery of ACS’s three focal plane camera systems. His research interests focus on studying the formation and evolution of planetary systems. Dr. Clampin has also designed ground-based telescope instruments including adaptive optics systems, coronagraphs and detectors.
Dr. Clampin graduated from the University of London with a BS in Physics and from the University of Saint Andrews in Scotland, with PhD in Astronomy. Dr. Clampin is the recipient of the Meritorious Presidential Rank Award, NASA’s Exceptional Achievement Medal for his work on the Webb Telescope, NASA’s Scientific Achievement Medal and the AAAS Newcomb-Cleveland Prize. He is a Fellow of SPIE and the Royal Astronomical Society. Dr. Clampin was the founding Editor of SPIE’s peer-reviewed Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments and Systems (JATIS), and served as Chief Editor for 7 years.
Read More About Dr. Clampin
Dr. Mark Clampin loves talking about the James Webb Space Telescope and has done so at many meetings for scientific, technical and general audiences. He was the Webb telescope Observatory Project Scientist and worked in the Exoplanets and Stellar Astrophysics Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md until 2015. Currently Clampin is the Director, Sciences and Exploration Directorate at NASA Goddard.
His research interests include: Formations and Evolution of planetary systems, Direct imaging of Exoplanets, Astronomical Instrumentation, Flight detector systems, Coronagraphs, Stellar Populations
Clampin is currently working on a number of projects, including the James Webb Space Telescope. He is the Principal Investigator of the Extrasolar Planetary Imaging Coronagraph (EPIC) Discovery Mission Concept and of the Transit Characterization Explorer (TRACER), a SMEX mission concept. Dr Clampin was a Co-Investigator and Detector Scientist for Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) science team; and he is a Principal Investigator and Co-Investigator on the Hubble Space Telescope, Spitzer and ground-based investigations of debris disks.
Prior to joining the Webb telescope project, Clampin was a member of the science staff at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), Baltimore, Md. where he served as an Instrument Scientist for the Hubble Space Telescope instrument Wide-Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2), and the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS). He served as the Advanced Camera for Surveys Group manager from its inception to the completion of orbital verification of the instrument.
Clampin received a Ph.D. in Physics in 1986 from the University of Saint Andrews, St. Andrews, in Fife, Scotland. In 1982 he received a B.S. in Physics from University of London, England.
For more information on Dr. Clampin and select publications, see his CV