Professor Fiona Harrison has been awarded an honorary doctorate at DTU. As a professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) she has devoted her career to exploring gamma-rays and hard X-rays resulting from some of the most energetic phenomena in the Universe like black holes and supernovae.
In order to achieve this goal she pioneered the development of focusing hard X-ray telescopes and new semiconductor based array detectors with the very low background noise and energy resolution required to obtain the angular resolution, which is necessary to improve our understanding of how stars explode and how elements are created.
Fiona Harrison is one of the few women who have taken the leadership as principal investigator in a NASA space mission. Her mission, named NuSTAR, will, for the first time, observe these phenomena with a focusing telescope in the hard X-ray band. Such a frontline effort is only possible by collecting a team of world experts in developing the technology. DTU Space plays a key role in the development of the focusing optics for NuSTAR.