Last year our team discovered the near-infrared afterglow of GRB 090423 and proved that it was the most distant object in the Universe - now listed as such in the Guinness Book of World Records. This gamma-ray burst occurred when the Universe was just 630 million years old - more than 13 billion years ago - when the first galaxies were only just being constructed. Gamma-ray bursts such as this one have inspired a team of us at Penn State, Cornell University, and Southwest Research to propose JANUS, an Explorer Mission dedicated to "observing the illumination of the Universe", to NASA. We were one of three astrophysics missions advanced to Phase A in the 2008 competition, and we will be reproposing to NASA later this year.

In my first year at Penn State, I led a team that helped solve the 35-year old mystery of the short-duration gamma-ray bursts by locating one such burst to a blue dwarf galaxy two billion light-years from Earth and observing its fading afterglow for almost a month with the Hubble Space Telescope. The resolution of this mystery caused significant excitement around the globe, and was the occasion for a NASA press conference in October 2005. I then coauthored a paper making use of these results to calculate, for the first time, the expected rate of gravity-wave detections from short bursts for various generations of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO).

As a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech, I adapted the Oschin 48-inch and Oscar Meyer 60-inch telescopes of Palomar Observatory to the task of rapid-response GRB observations. These facilities were used to discover three burst afterglows - GRB021004, GRB021211, and GRB040924 - at a very young age. The behavior of the GRB021004 afterglow, in particular, inspired a NASA press conference in March 2003. By moving quickly to observe and analyze the data from these and other facilities during this time, I discovered the afterglows of more than a dozen GRBs, and with colleagues at Caltech found the first three afterglows of X-ray Flashes (XRFs), and the first XRF redshift, z=0.251 for XRF020903.

I am a graduate of the astrophysics program within the MIT physics department. I received my Ph.D. in September 2000 with thesis advisor Professor Walter H. G. Lewin. Walter was recently the subject of a front-page story at the New York Times - his first-year physics course is one of the most popular courses on the Internet.

Graduate Students

• Antonino Cucchiara completed his PhD thesis, "Gamma-Ray Burst Afterglows as Probes of their Host Galaxies and the Cosmos", in June 2010, and is now a postdoc with Peter Nugent at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
• Lijun Gou (advisor Peter Mészáros) completed his PhD thesis in August 2007, and is now a postdoc with Jeffrey McClintock at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

• Current undergraduate researchers: Jacob Howell, Kyle Conlon, and Ross Stouffer.
• Andrew Shevchuk graduated with honors in June 2009 and is now an NSF Graduate Fellow in astronomy at the University of Arizona.
• Lu Feng graduated with honors in June 2009 and is now an NSF Graduate Fellow in physics at MIT.
• Ryan Letcavage graduated in June 2009 and is now a graduate student of astronomy at UC Irvine.

• Fall 2010: Astro 320 - Astronomy Laboratory and Astro 451 - Astronomical Techniques
• Spring 2010: Astro 585 - The Panchromatic Approach to Gamma-Ray Bursts

• Rapid-Response Afterglow Studies and Software from Penn State, Swift Cycle 6
• Towards Complete Identification of the ROSAT All-Sky Survey Bright Source Catalog, Swift Cycle 6
• Identifying the Nearest and Brightest Neutron Stars, Chandra Cycle 10
• Redshifts for GLAST Gamma-Ray Bursts, Fermi/GLAST Cycle 1
• Afterglows and Host Galaxies of Short-Hard Gamma-Ray Bursts, HST Cycle 15
• Hobby-Eberly Telescope Observations of Gamma-Ray Burst Afterglows (ongoing)
• Gemini TOO Observations of Gamma-Ray Bursts (ongoing)
• The Palomar Transient Factory

Thesis
X-ray Observations of Globular Clusters, Low-Mass X-ray Binaries, and a Supernova, MIT Physics, September 2000

Selected Publications
I maintain my publications list dynamically via ADS - you may browse my full list of publications, or the refereed and arxiv.org articles only. If you are after my most recent publications you may wish to search the ADS, although please note that there is some contamination (other 'D. Fox' individuals) in this search.

Gamma-Ray Burst Reviews:

• Gamma-Ray Bursts in the Swift Era, N. Gehrels, E. Ramirez-Ruiz, & D. B. Fox 2009, ARA&A, 47, 567
• GRB Fireball Physics: Prompt and Early Emission, D. B. Fox & P. Mészáros 2006, NJPh, 8, 199

• A gamma-ray burst at a redshift of z~8.2, N. Tanvir et al. 2010, Nature, 461, 1254
• Hubble Space Telescope Observations of Short Gamma-Ray Burst Host Galaxies: Morphologies, Offsets, and Local Environments, W. Fong, E. Berger & D. B. Fox 2010, ApJ, 708, 9
• GRB 070610: A Curious Galactic Transient, M. M. Kasliwal et al. 2008, ApJ, 678, 1127
• Modeling GRB 050904: Autopsy of a Massive Stellar Explosion at z=6.29, L.-J. Gou, D. B. Fox, & P. Mészáros 2007, ApJ, 668, 1083
• A novel explosive process is required for GRB 060614, A. Gal-Yam et al. 2006, Nature, 444, 1053
• The Local Rate and the Progenitor Lifetimes of Short-Hard Gamma-Ray Bursts: Synthesis and Predictions for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, E. Nakar, A. Gal-Yam, & D. B. Fox 2006, ApJ, 650, 281
• Relativistic ejecta from XRF 060218 and the rate of cosmic explosions, A. M. Soderberg et al. 2006, Nature, 442, 1014
• The afterglow of GRB 050709 and the nature of short-hard gamma-ray bursts, D. B. Fox et al. 2005, Nature, 437, 845

• PTF10fqs: A Luminous Red Nova in the Spiral Galaxy Messier 99, M. Kasliwal et al. 2010, ApJ, submitted
• An unusually brilliant transient in the galaxy M85, E. Ofek et al. 2007, Nature, 447, 458
• On the progenitor of SN 2005gl and the Nature of Type IIn Supernovae, A. Gal-Yam et al. 2007, ApJ, 656, 372
• A non-spherical core in the explosion of supernova SN 2004dj, D. C. Leonard et al. 2006, Nature, 440, 505
• A high angular-resolution search for the progenitor of the type Ic supernova SN 2004gt, A. Gal-Yam et al. 2005, ApJL, 630, L29
• Photometric Typing Analyses of Three Young Supernovae with the Robotic Palomar 60-Inch Telescope, A. M. Rajala et al. 2004, PASP, 117, 132

• Chandra Observations of 1RXS J141256.0+792204 (Calvera), Shevchuk, Fox & Rutledge 2009, ApJ, 705, 391
• Discovery of an Isolated Compact Object at High Galactic Latitude, Rutledge, Fox & Shevchuk 2008, ApJ, 672, 1137
• A ROSAT Bright Source Catalog Survey with the Swift Satellite, Derek B. Fox, 2004
• Microsecond Timing of PSR B1821-24 with Chandra High Resolution Camera-S, R. E. Rutledge, D. W. Fox, S. R. Kulkarni, B. A. Jacoby, I. Cognard, D. C. Backer, & S. S. Murray, 2004, ApJ, 613, 522
• A Limit on the Number of Isolated Neutron Stars Detected in the ROSAT Bright Source Catalogue, R. E. Rutledge, D. W. Fox, M. Bogosavljevic, & A. Mahabal, 2003, ApJ, 598, 458