Steve Bruce Howell
2026 Bruce Medalist
Date of Birth:
Raised in a small town in Pennsylvania, Steve Howell earned an associate degree at Allegheny Community College, a bachelor’s degree at Mount Union College, and master’s degrees in astronomy at Pennsylvania State University and in physics at the University of Toledo, the last in 1982. He then did research in lasers and computational physics at General Motors in a position he calls his “postdoc”, although it actually preceded his doctoral studies. He worked at Kitt Peak National Observatory, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and the Planetary Science Institute before completing his Ph.D. at the University of Amsterdam in 1995. His doctoral thesis, supervised by Jan van Paradijs, was titled “Photometric Observations of Faint Cataclysmic Variables.” After several more years at Kitt Peak and faculty positions at the University of California, Riverside and the University of Wyoming, he joined the NASA Ames Research Center, where he has worked since 2011. Head of the Space Science and Astrobiology Division from 2017 to 2019, he is now a Senior Research Scientist.
An instrumentalist since childhood, Howell has long been active in developing CCD-based instruments for astronomy and wrote a book on it, the Handbook of CCD Astronomy. Now in its second edition, it has been used as a textbook and reference in many countries. He has designed numerous cameras and detectors. He has researched interacting and variable stars and stellar evolution throughout his career.
Sometime around the turn of the millennium, Howell joined William Borucki, David Koch, and others in planning and lobbying for a satellite telescope that would stare at a fixed region of space and continuously monitor the brightnesses of more than 150,000 stars for years. Once they changed its name to Kepler, they succeeded in getting funding and spent several more years designing and building it. The goal was to discover exoplanets which passed in front of their stars, dimming the stars very slightly but periodically. (The first exoplanets, or planets outside our Solar System, were discovered by others in the 1990s, years after Borucki started working on his proposal.) About 350 exoplanets were known by the time Kepler was launched in March 2009, nearly all Jupiter-sized or larger. Howell was the Project Scientist for Kepler and its extension, K2, from 2011 to 2017. He coauthored most of the papers published by the missions. Nearly 5000 new exoplanets were reported in these papers (including those not yet confirmed). The list includes nearly all the small planets, including some that are Earth-sized. K2’s working life ended in October 2018. Its successor, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), was launched six months earlier. By now, TESS has found even more exoplanets than K2. Some 268 of Howell’s nearly 1500 publications, starting four years before launch, deal with TESS and discoveries made with it.
Howell’s community activities include public outreach presentations on healthy eating, music composition, and an interactive musical titled “We Came to Dance”. He has also written and edited science fiction dealing with exoplanets.
Personal Web Page
Presentation of Bruce medal
Astronomical Society of the Pacific
Biographical materials
STEVE B. HOWELL, Author - Interview, 28 May 2015, by Anthony R. Cardno
Vorobets, Mark V., Interview with Space Science Division Chief, Steve Howell, 25 July 2018
Academic genealogy
Named after him
Bibliography
Other References: Historical
Howell, Steve B., & Elliott P. Horch, “High-resolution speckle imaging,” Physics Today 71(11), 78-79 (2018).
Howell, Steve B., “The Grand Challenges of Exoplanets,” Front. Astron. Space Sci. 7 (2020).
Howell, Steve B., ed., The NASA Kepler Mission (IOP Publishing, 2020).
Search SciX for works about Howell
Other References: Scientific
Search SciX for works by Howell (This search will also yield a few publications by one or more other S. Howells.)
Other Works: Popularizations, History, etc.
Howell, Steve B., ed., Astronomical CCD Observing and Reduction Techniques (ASP, 1992).
Howell, Steve B., Handbook of CCD Astronomy (Cambridge Univ. Pess, 2000, 2006).
Howell, Steve B. & David Lee Summers, eds. A Kepler's Dozen: Thirteen Stories About Distant Worlds That Really Exist (Hadrosaur Productions, 2013). (Science fiction. Howell wrote one of the stories and is coauthor of essays relating all of them to real exoplanets.)
Howell, Steve B. & David Lee Summers, eds. Kepler's Cowboys (Hadrosaur Productions, 2017). (Science fiction. Howell wrote one of the stories and is coauthor of essays relating all of them to real exoplanets.)