Currently Senior Research Scientist with LASP (Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics), University of Colorado; Emeritus, NASA GSFC

Dr. Michael King is a Senior Scientist Emeritus in the Earth Sciences Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center; previously, he served as Senior Project Scientist of NASA’s Earth Observing System (EOS) from 1992 to 2008. He began his career at Goddard Space Flight Center in January 1978 as a physical scientist, and served as Project Scientist of the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) from 1983-1992. The Earth Radiation Budget Satellite (ERBS) was the first science satellite launched from the Space Shuttle (STS 41-G) and was deployed by Sally Ride from Challenger in October 1984. After retiring from NASA in April 2008, he joined the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, where he currently holds a faculty appointment as a Senior Research Scientist.

His research experience includes conceiving, developing, and operating multispectral scanning radiometers from a number of aircraft platforms in field experiments ranging from arctic stratus clouds to smoke from the Kuwait oil fires and biomass burning in Brazil and southern Africa. He has lectured on global change on all seven continents. He developed the Cloud Absorption Radiometer (CAR) for studying the absorption properties of optically thick clouds as well as the bidirectional reflectance properties of many natural surfaces, and is principal investigator of the MODIS Airborne Simulator, an imaging spectrometer that flies onboard the NASA ER-2 aircraft.

Dr. King has received many awards including the William Nordberg Memorial Award for Earth Science, the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal, NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal, and the NASA Exceptional Service Medal; the Verner E. Suomi Award of the AMS for fundamental contributions to remote sensing and radiative transfer; and recipient of the Space Systems Award of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) for NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS) Team. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and the American Meteorological Society (AMS), and most recently, a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).