Don Figer

Don Figer is Professor in the College of Science and Founder and Director of the Rochester Imaging Detector Laboratory, Center for Detectors, and the Future Photon Initiative at RIT. He previously was co-founder and Director of the Independent Detector Testing Laboratory at the Space Telescope Science Institute where he led a team to do the competitive characterization of prototype infrared detectors for the James Webb Space Telescope. He has been PI on dozens of observational astrophysics and instrumentation development programs. Dr. Figer studies massive stars, young star clusters, and the Galactic center. He identified the Pistol star as one of the most massive known. He made the first direct measurement of an upper limit to the masses of stars and has discovered more evolved massive stars and massive star clusters in the Galaxy than any other researcher. Dr. Figer has authored 300 publications with over 8,500 citations and has an h-index of 48.