Solar Physics Laboratory, NASA GSFC

Dr. Brian R. Dennis was educated in England at Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School, Horncastle, Lincolnshire, and at the University of Leeds, Yorkshire. He received his Ph.D. at Leeds in 1964 and immediately moved to the United States to become a research associate at the University of Rochester, New York. He became a National Research Council (NRC) Resident Research Associate at Goddard Space Flight Center in 1967, a government employee at GSFC as an astrophysicist in 1969, and a U.S. citizen in 1975. Working in the Solar Physics Branch at Goddard, Dr. Dennis has been involved in designing, building, operating, and analyzing data from several X-ray and gamma-ray instruments for observations of solar flares and cosmic X-ray sources. He was a Co-investigator of the Celestial X-Ray Spectrometer on the 8th Orbiting Solar Observatory and Principal Investigator (PI) of the Hard X-Ray Burst Spectrometer on the Solar Maximum Mission (SMM). He co-chaired the Max 91 program to coordinate observations of solar activity during the solar maximum centered around 1991. He is the Mission Scientist and lead Co-I of the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI), a NASA Small Explorer (SMEX) mission launched on 5 February 2002. In 2004, Dr. Dennis received the Goddard Lindsay Award and a NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal for over two decades of work in high energy solar physics that has culminated with the ongoing success of RHESSI.