Primary Job Title Co-founder, Chief Scientist, and VP for R&D Primary Organization FreeFall Aerospace
Location Tucson, Arizona, United States Regions Western US Gender Male
LinkedIn View on LinkedIn
Professor Christopher Walker has over 30 years of experience designing, building, and using state-of-the-art antenna and receiver systems for terahertz astronomy. Prof. Walker has published numerous papers on star formation and protostellar evolution. He has served as dissertation director for ten Ph.D. students and is a Topical Editor for IEEE
Transactions on TeraHertz Science and Technology. Prof. Walker has worked in industry (TRW Aerospace and JPL) as well as academia. As a Millikan Fellow in Physics at Caltech, he worked on the development of low-noise, SIS waveguide receivers above 400 GHz and explored techniques for etching waveguides out of silicon.
On joining the UofA faculty in 1991, he began the Steward Observatory Radio Astronomy Lab (SORAL), which has become a world leader in developing THz receiver systems for astronomy and other remote sensing applications. Instruments developed by Prof. Walker’s team have served as primary facility instruments at the Heinrich Hertz Telescope on Mt. Graham, AZ, and the AST/RO telescope at the South Pole. Prof. Walker led the effort to design and build the world’s largest (64 pixels) submillimeter-wave heterodyne array receiver.
He is PI of the NASA-funded long-duration balloon project “The Stratospheric THz Observatory (STO)’’, which had a successful Antarctic flight earlier this year. The follow-on project to STO, called GUSTO, was recently selected by NASA as the first balloon-borne mission under the auspices of the Explorer Program. He is also PI of the “10-meter Suborbital Large Balloon Reflector (LBR)” project, selected by the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program for a Phase I and II study. He recently authored Terahertz Astronomy, the first textbook in his field of study.
