William H. Press

William H. Press
William H. Press (1980 photo)
Born	(1948-05-23) May 23, 1948 (age 68) New York City
Fields	theoretical physics astrophysics computer science
Institutions	Harvard University Los Alamos National Laboratory University of Texas at Austin
Alma mater	Harvard, A.B. (1969) Caltech, Ph.D. (1973)
Doctoral advisor	Kip Thorne
Doctoral students	David Spergel Adam Riess
Known for	Press–Schechter formalism Numerical Recipes

William Henry Press (born May 23, 1948) is an astrophysicist, theoretical physicist, computer scientist, and computational biologist. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Council on Foreign Relations. Other honors include the 1981 Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy. Press has been a member of the JASON defense advisory group since 1977 and is a past chair.

From 2009 through 2016, Press served as Vice Chair of President Obama's President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). In 2012-2013, he served as the 165th President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In July, 2016, he became the elected Treasurer of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and a member of its Council and Governing Board.

Press attended public schools in Pasadena, California, graduating from Pasadena High School in 1965. His undergraduate education was at Harvard, where he received an A.B. in physics in 1969. He received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics, from Caltech, in 1973, a student of Kip Stephen Thorne. Press was briefly an assistant professor at Caltech, then was assistant professor at Princeton University (1974–1976) before returning to Harvard as a professor in 1976. At the age of 28, he was the university's then-youngest tenured faculty member (a distinction earlier held by Alan Dershowitz and later by Lawrence Summers and—at age 26—Noam Elkies).