Career Summary:   Dr. Danchi began his professional career as a post-doctoral research fellow with Nobel Laureate Professor Charles H. Townes at the University of California at Berkeley, where he held the L.W. Fröhlich Research Fellowship of the New York Academy of Sciences. He was a Senior Fellow (Research Professor) and then Senior Space Fellow (tenured Research Professor) at the Space Sciences Laboratory in Berkeley. During that time period he co-led the Infrared and Millimeter-wave Astrophysics Group at the Space Sciences Lab with Dr. Townes. In 2000 he received an appointment at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. From 2001 until 2004 he was the Head of the Infrared Astrophysics Branch, and in 2004 he was promoted to Senior Astrophysicist (a Senior Executive Service appointment).  He has been focused primarily on exoplanet and stellar astronomy research since the early 2000’s and was for many years on the US Terrestrial Planet Finder Interferometer and the European Darwin science working groups.  In the late 2000’s he led a large group of international scientists planning infrared exoplanet missions for the Astro2010 Decadal Survey, as part of the US Exoplanet Community Forum.  In the past few years he was active in two large projects with the Herschel Space Observatory, the DUNES (Dust Around Nearby Stars), and GASPS (Gas Around Protoplanetary Systems) projects, as well as observations of protoplanetary disks involving the Keck Interferometer, the Very Large Telescope Interferometer, and the Berkeley Infrared Spatial Interferometer. From 2010 to 2012 he was detailed at NASA Headquarters as the Program Scientist overseeing the Spitzer, WMAP, Herschel, Planck, WISE, and GP-B missions.  Until recently he was a member of the NASA Large Binocular Telescope Interferometer (LBTI) Hunt for Observable Signatures of Terrestrial Systems (HOSTS) science team.  He led the Exoplanet and Stellar Astrophysics Laboratory as the Acting Chief from 2016 to 2017 and Source Evaluation Boards for NASA Goddard Astrophysics from 2015 to 2017, and Heliophysics from 2020 - 2021. He was the Director of the Sellers Exoplanet Environments Collaboration (SEEC) from 2018 to 2019.  Over the course of his career, he has also led study teams for exoplanet mission concepts and ultraviolet astronomical probe mission concepts.

He has been the Chair or Co-Chair and a member of the Science Organizing Committee for many conferences and has been a reviewer for NASA, NSF, and international research proposals and he has reviewed papers for many journals.    Over the course of his career Dr. Danchi has published over 423 total, 170 peer reviewed, papers in the areas of superconducting devices, submillimeter and infrared astrophysics, stellar interferometry, planet forming young stars, and exoplanet science.

Education:  William Danchi received a Bachelor of Physics with Honors from the California Institute of Technology in 1978. He received his Masters and Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard University in 1979 and 1983, respectively, under the direction of thesis advisor Professor Michael Tinkham.