After earning his Ph.D. at Chicago, he conducted post-doctoral work at the University of Cambridge. From 1971 to 1995, Ostriker was a professor at Princeton, and served as Provost there from 1995 to 2001. From 2001 to 2003, he was appointed as Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge. He then returned to Princeton as the Charles Young Professor of Astronomy and is now the Charles A. Young Professor Emeritus.[7] He continues as a senior research scholar at Princeton and became a professor of astronomy at Columbia in 2012.
Ostriker has been very influential in advancing the theory that most of the mass in the universe is not visible at all, but consists of dark matter.[8][9] His research has also focused on the interstellar medium, galaxy evolution, cosmology and black holes. On June 20, 2013 Ostriker was given the White House Champions of Change Award for his role in initiating the Sloan Digital Sky Survey project, which makes all of its astronomical data sets available publicly on the Internet [10]
Ostriker is also known for the Ostriker–Peebles criterion, relating to the stability of galactic formation.
Publications
As of April 2021, Ostriker's articles have been cited over 85,910 times and he has an h-index of 130 (130 papers with at least 130 citations) according to the NASA Astrophysics Data System including:
Ostriker married noted poet and essayist Alicia Ostriker (née Suskin) in 1959. Together they have three adult children: Rebecca, Eve, and Gabriel.[7] Like her father, Eve became an astrophysics professor at Princeton University, in 2012, the same year as her father's retirement.[18] Jeremiah and Alicia Ostriker have been residents of Princeton, New Jersey.[19]
