Malcolm B Niedner

Dr. Niedner serves as Deputy Senior Project Scientist-Technical for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a position held since January 2011. From 1993 through 2010 he was the Deputy Senior Project Scientist for the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). He worked on all five space shuttle servicing missions and made contributions to five science instruments as well as three instrument repairs. A NASA civil servant since 1980, Niedner has specialized in solar wind and interplanetary magnetic field interactions with comets and made contributions to the understanding of complex plasma/fields phenomena. He introduced magnetic field reconnection to comets in ways that have observable consequences as well as uses in the study of the heliosphere in three dimensions. In 1985 he calculated the optimum targeting point for the ICE spacecraft to transit the plasma tail of comet P/Giacobini-Zinner. More recently he has become involved in studies of Young Stellar Objects and circumstellar disks using Hubble data obtained by the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS).

A. B. in Physics, Brown University, 1971
M. A. in Astronomy, Indiana University, 1976
Ph.D. in Astronomy, Indiana University, 1979