Dr. William Pence

Job Description: Astrophysicist

Phone: (301) 286-4599

e-mail: william.d.pence@nasa.gov

William (Bill) Pence joined the HEASARC in December 1990 and has concentrated on developing standard FITS file formats for data from current and past high energy astronomy missions.

Bill received his PhD in astronomy in 1978 from the University of Texas at Austin. He held research positions at the University of Sussex (UK) from 1978 to 1981, and then at the Anglo-Australian Observatory in Sydney, Australia from 1981 to 1984. Most of his scientific research has been devoted to the study of the internal photometric and kinematic properties of nearby spiral galaxies. He joined the Space Telescope Science Institute from 1984 to 1990, where he was Project Scientist for development of the Calibration Database Software System and later was head of the branch responsible for archiving and distributing the Hubble Space Telescope data.