William H. Press

Who is William H. Press?

William H. Press is an astrophysicist, theoretical physicist, and computational biologist. He is a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Council on Foreign Relations. Other honors include the 1981 Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy.

In April, 2009, President Obama named Press as a member of his President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. In February, 2012, he became the 165th President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Press attended public schools in Pasadena, California, graduating from Pasadena High School in 1965. His undergraduate education was at Harvard, where he received an A.B. in physics in 1969. He received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics, from Caltech, in 1973, a student of Kip Stephen Thorne. Press was briefly an assistant professor at Caltech, then was assistant professor at Princeton University before returning to Harvard as a professor in 1976. At the age of 28, he was the university's then-youngest tenured faculty member.