Owen Gingerich is Professor emeritus of Astronomy and History of Science at the Harvard- Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Trained as an astrophysicist, by the 1970s his interests turned increasingly to the history of science because of the broader base for learning how science functions in our understanding of the cosmos. He has chaired Harvard’s History of Science Department, headed the US National Committee for the International Astronomical Union, and served as vice president of the American Philosophical Society, America’s oldest learned academy. An expert on the scientific revolution that took place with Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton, Gingerich has personally examined nearly 600 copies of Copernicus’ pioneering treatise in a search for annotations to discover early readers’ opinions concerning the novel heliocentric cosmology. He also researches the history of 20th-century cosmology, and continues to serve on the selection committee for the $500,000 Gruber Prize in Cosmology. Gingerich has lectured widely and written from a Christian perspective on the role of science and faith. He is particularly interested in the implications of the remarkable nuclear structure of the carbon atom, without which the abundance of carbon would be too low for abundant life in the cosmos. His books include God’s Universe and God’s Planet, both from Harvard University Press. His essay on “Our Imperiled World,” presented to the United Nations General Assembly in 2012, discussed the environmental threats to creatures great and small. Passionate travelers, Gingerich and his wife have visited every continent, generally bringing back shells for their collection of roughly 2,000 mollusc species. Enthusiasts for natural history, they enjoy making lists of bird sightings, and they have observed a dozen total solar eclipses. An asteroid has been named Gingerich in his honor.