Bio/CV
Steven M. Kahn is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy. He previously served on the faculty in these departments from 1984-98, but returned to Berkeley in 2022 to take up the position of Dean of Mathematical and Physical Sciences. Kahn received his A.B. (summa cum laude) from Columbia in 1975 and his Ph.D. in physics at Berkeley in 1980. In addition to Berkeley, he has served on the faculties of Columbia, where he was the I.I. Rabi Professor of Physics, and at Stanford, where he was the Cassius Lamb Kirk Professor in the Natural Sciences. Kahn is an experimental astrophysicist and cosmologist. He was the U.S. Principal Investigator for the Reflection Grating Spectrometer on the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton Observatory, which was launched in December 1999 and is still flying. More recently, he was the Director of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, currently under construction, which will begin operations in 2024. Kahn is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
