Eames @ MIT

The Eames chair is an icon of mid 20th century design and styling, and it also happens to be located in the Flagship Admirals' Club lounge at DFW international airport. Adam Burgasser has spent more time in this location than almost anyone we know, having both observed at Magellan many many times, and also commuted between Boston and Hawaii for 4 years. Adam likes the Club so much that he wanted to bring a little piece home with him to the office and also lure Gen to spend time there. Thus arrived the Eames chair @ MIT: the most expensive and classy piece of furniture to grace the 6th floor of Building 37.

With Adam now at UCSD, we need something to make him pine for his days at MIT and come for the occasional visit, other than needing the miles to keep up his Exec platinum status. He announced the first inaugural competition for the AJB chair in astrophysics, with bylaws specified here. The first winner was Professor Scott Hughes.

The bylaws fo the Chair stipulate that upon promotion to tenure or departure, the Chair holder must re-initiate the competition to new junior faculty. The first Chairman was pleased to receive promotion on May 8. A mere 7 months later, the offical Call for Proposals was issued to the Junior faculty, with results of the competition to be announced in January 2011.

		Adam J Burgasser (2005-2009) - Shown here in his natural habitat. Clearly Prof. Burgasser is in need of a stint in the chair.
		Scott A. Hughes (2009-2010) - The second chair-holder, hard at work leaving his imprint on the chair. He is most likely trying to find a lost factor of c in a calculation for 8.033, but perhaps is looking in the wrong book to solve that problem.
		Rob Simcoe (2011-2017) - Blah blah blah
		Michael McDonald (2018-2022) - The fourth chair-holder, pictured here sitting on a rock. His tenure as chairholder coincided with the the COVID-19 pandemic, and thus he was relegated to sitting on vastly inferior chairs for bulk of his time as chair-holder.

Prof. Hughes (AJB 2009-2010) initiated the tradition of acknowledging the chair in publications that benefitted from its use. This tradition has since continued (though Prof. McDonald did a terrible job of keeping it up) and an informal listing of cited publications can be found here.