William Borucki

William J. Borucki is an American space scientist born in 1939 who worked at NASA Ames Research Center. After joining NASA in 1962 he researched Apollo program spacecraft heat shields, then investigated lightning strikes in planetary atmospheres and their potential to create prebiotic molecules, before turning to the detection of exoplanets by the transit method. He served as principal investigator for the NASA Kepler space telescope mission, launched March 7, 2009 to search for habitable planets, and received the National Academy of Sciences Henry Draper Medal in 2013 for that work. He received the 2015 Shaw Prize in Astronomy.