David C. Jewitt

David C. Jewitt (* 1958 in North London ) is a professor of astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles ( UCLA). With his doctoral student Jane Luu, he discovered in 1992, the first object in the Kuiper belt.

Jewitt 1979 acquired his bachelor's degree in astronomy at the University of London and his master's degree at Caltech in 1980, where he received his doctorate in 1983. In 1983 he was Assistant Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and moved in 1988 to the University of Hawaii as an associate professor and from 1993 as a professor. In 2009 he became a professor at UCLA, where he directs the Institute for Planets and Exoplanets.

In 2007, he was Adjunct Professor at the National Central University in Taiwan.

His research mainly handle the objects in the outer solar system, of which he discovered, together with colleagues previously 39, and the physical properties of comets. In addition, he was involved in the discovery of several small moons of Jupiter.

In 2012 Shaw Prize in Astronomy of him with Jane Luu and the Kavli Prize for Astrophysics with Jane Luu and Michael E. Brown was awarded. In 1998 he became a Fellow of University College London and 1996 Scientist of the Year in Hawaii. In 1996 he received an Exceptional Achievement Award from NASA. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (2005), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2005) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2006 he became an Honorary Professor at the National Astronomical Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and in 2012 a foreign member of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences.