Maxim Markevitch has been an astrophysicist at the X-ray Astrophysics Laboratory in Goddard since 2011. He earned his PhD in physics in 1993 from the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. He has worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science in Japan, the University of Virginia, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. From 1997 to 2010, he served as a staff astrophysicist at the Chandra X-ray Center.
Markevitch's scientific interests include the physics of galaxy clusters, cosmology, the nature of dark matter, and X-ray, radio, and microwave observations of galaxy clusters and the intergalactic medium. He has worked with X-ray data from space missions including Granat, ASCA, ROSAT, Chandra, XMM-Newton, Hitomi, and most recently XRISM, and participated in the in-orbit calibration and developed data analysis methods for several of them.
His technological interests include designing new X-ray missions (recently including Probe concepts AXIS and LEM and a small concept Cal X-1), and developing novel X-ray optics.