JOHN C. MATHER is a Senior Astrophysicist in the Observational Cosmology Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Maryland. His research centers on infrared astronomy and cosmology. Mather has served on advisory and working groups for the National Academy of Sciences, NASA, and the NSF (for the ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, and for the CARA, the Center for Astrophysical Research in the Antarctic). He is a member of the Astrophysics Subcommittee of the NASA Advisory Committee and of the Standing Review Board for the Kepler project. In 2006, Mather won the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on COBE with George Smoot.