Dr. Michael Shara is currently Curator, Department of Astrophysics, Division of Physical Sciences of the American Museum of Natural History.  Prior to joining the Museum in 1999, Michael Shara was with the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins for 17 years, where he was responsible for the peer review committees for the Hubble Space Telescope.

He has been both visiting and adjunct professor at Columbia University; associate astronomer and astronomer with tenure at Space Telescope Science Institute; visiting assistant in the Department of Physics at Arizona State University; and National Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Physics at the University of Montreal. Dr. Shara’s research interests include the structure and evolution of novae and supernovae; collisions between stars and the remnant descendants of those collisions; and the populations of stars inhabiting star clusters and galaxies.

He has served on the National Science Foundation Compact Stars Review Panel, Infrared Processing and Analysis Center User’s Committee, Cerro Tololo InterAmerican Observatory User’s Committee, and NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database Project Advisory Committee, among others. He is a veteran of 5 solar eclipses.