Charles R. Alcock
Charles Robert Alcock ( born June 15, 1951 in Windsor, England) is an American astronomer.
Alcock received his doctoral degree in 1977 at the California Institute of Technology. After that, he was a scientist at the Institute for Advanced Study ( Princeton ), 1981-1986 Associate Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from 1986 to 2000 at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where he headed the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics. After a period as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania since 2004 he is director of the Harvard - Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Alcock was a leading scientist of the MACHO project to search for faint but massive objects in the halo of the Milky Way using the micro- lens effect. Such objects have been sought as a possible part of the dark matter. He leads a search for objects in the outer region of the solar system by means of stellar occultations, the Taiwanese - American Occulation Survey.