Rate My Professor Robert Kraft

Robert Kraft, Professor Emeritus of Astronomy and Astrophysics in the Space Science faculty at the University of California, Santa Cruz, earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees in mathematics from the University of Washington and his Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of California, Berkeley. Early in his career, he served as an instructor at Whittier College, postdoctoral fellow at Mount Wilson Observatory, assistant professor at Indiana University and Yerkes Observatory of the University of Chicago, and staff astronomer at the Carnegie Institution's Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories. In 1967, he joined the astronomy faculty at UC Santa Cruz and Lick Observatory, where he later became acting director, director of Lick Observatory in 1981, and director of the University of California Observatories from 1988 to 1991. During his directorship, he played a pivotal role in committing UC resources to the construction and instrumentation of the W. M. Keck Observatory, the world's first 10-meter telescope.

Kraft's research focused on stellar spectroscopy, particularly demonstrating that novae and dwarf novae originate from mass-transfer in close binary systems, as detailed in his seminal papers such as "The Binary Stars Among Cataclysmic Variables" (1962, 1964) and studies on specific systems like DQ Herculis (1959) and WZ Sagittae (1962, 1964). He calibrated interstellar dust effects on Cepheid variables (1961), identified the dependence of stellar rotation on age—"Kraft break" (1967)—and investigated chemical compositions of metal-poor halo stars and globular cluster giants, advancing Galactic archaeology. His contributions earned him election to the National Academy of Sciences (1971) and American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1973), the American Astronomical Society's Warner Prize (1962) and Henry Norris Russell Lectureship (1995), presidency of the AAS (1974-1976) and International Astronomical Union (1997-2000), and the Astronomical Society of the Pacific's Catherine Wolfe Bruce Gold Medal (2005). Kraft's administrative and scientific leadership profoundly influenced modern observational astronomy and space science.