Timothy M. Heckman is the inaugural Dr. A. Hermann Pfund Professor. Professor Heckman received a BA magna cum laude from Harvard College and a PhD in astrophysics from the University of Washington. He then held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Leiden Observatory followed by the Bart Bok Fellowship at the Steward Observatory. In 1982, he joined the faculty in the Astronomy Program at the University of Maryland. He came to Hopkins in 1989, holding a joint appointment as a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and tenured astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute. He became a full-time Hopkins faculty member in 1994. He was the director of the Center for Astrophysical Sciences from 2002 to 2015 and the Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy from 2015 to 2021 .

Dr. Heckman’s research has focused on the evolution of galaxies and supermassive black holes. He has authored or co-authored over 500 scholarly publications which have been cited over 100,000 times. He has given nearly 300 invited talks at universities, and national and international conferences. He has been awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, been elected a Fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Science, and has been awarded the Catherine Wolfe Bruce Gold Medal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.