Dr. Stamatios (Tom) Krimigis is Emeritus Head of the Space Exploration Sector at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), President of the Academy of Athens (2024) where he occupies the Chair of Science of Space and Applications, has built instruments that have flown to all 9 classical planets beginning with Mariner 4 to Mars in 1965 and ending with New Horizons to Pluto in 2015; also the Moon, the asteroid Eros, and the Parker Solar Probe to the Sun in 2018, and is Principal Investigator on NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 Interstellar Mission to the outer planets and the Galaxy.
In 1999 the International Astronomical Union named asteroid 1979 UH as 8323 Krimigis. Dr. Krimigis has published more than 640 papers (37 in Science, 13 in Nature) in journals and books with over 28,000 citations, is co-editor of the book Saturn from Cassini-Huygens (Springer, 2009); has been awarded the NASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement in 1981, 1986, and 2014, over forty NASA Group Achievement Awards for Voyager, AMPTE, Galileo, NEAR, Cassini, MESSENGER, ACE, etc. Among his recent awards are the Smithsonian Institutions’ National Air and Space Museum Trophy for Lifetime Achievement (2015), the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal (2016), the Theodore von Karman Award (2017) of the International Academy of Astronautics and the Distinguished Service Award (2020) of the International Astronautical Federation (IAF).
He is a member of Academia Europaea, and was honored by a special resolution of the U. S. Senate “for exceptional contributions to space science” (2018). A short video on his career produced by the Smithsonian can be found at (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvqtPPy6bQg)
