Dr. Phil Plait NASA E/PO Education Resource Director (NERD) 707-664-2190 FAX: 707-664-3263 http://badastronomy.com

Dr. Phil Plait is very excited about working on programs that educate people about high-energy astronomy. He spent many years as a research astronomer and programmer and now is the research manager for the GLAST EPO Team.

Phil has come to Sonoma county from suburban Maryland, where he worked at Goddard Space Flight Center. Phil participated in the calibration and use of the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS), an instrument on board the Hubble Space Telescope. He has done research ranging from STIS observations of the first ever brown dwarf discovered (a brown dwarf is an object that is too small to be a star but too big to be a planet) to other Hubble observations of Supernova 1987A, a star that blew up in 1987. Phil has also worked on asteroids, quasars, galaxies, normal stars, dying stars, and stars being born.

Phil received his Ph.D. in astronomy at the University of Virginia in 1994. While there, he helped teach introductory astronomy classes and for three years he ran a nighttime lab where students used binoculars and telescopes to observe the sky. It was during that time that Phil was bitten by the bug to teach astronomy to the public.

Balancing his enthusiasm of public outreach and writing, Phil enjoys spending time with his wife and daughter. He also has an alter-ego: as "The Bad Astronomer" he fights myths and misconceptions people have about astronomy, "As television and movies have become better and better at shaping our views of the world, it is becoming more and more important that people understand what it means to be scientific." To that end, he created the Bad Astronomy website, where he discusses misuses of astronomy in an informal and humorous way. Phil brings his experience in teaching and writing about astronomy to the GLAST EPO Team, where he will use them to help create workshops and interactive astronomy-based games to help teachers relay to their students the excitement and interest in astronomy that he feels.