As part of our Gemini GRB program, we have twice set the world record for the "most distant object" known to astronomy: Once in 2009, with our discovery and observations of the near-infrared afterglow of GRB 090423, and then again in 2011 with my graduate student Nino Cucchiara's discovery and observations of the near-infrared afterglow of GRB 090429B. These two gamma-ray bursts occurred more than 13 billion years ago, when the Universe was less than 700 million years old and its first galaxies were forming. 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's first-year physics course at MIT is one of the most popular courses on "iTunes U", and he has recently released a memoir, For the Love of Physics, discussing his life in research and education.

Graduate Students

• Antonino Cucchiara finished his PhD thesis, "Gamma-Ray Burst Afterglows as Probes of their Host Galaxies and the Cosmos", in June 2010, spent one year as a postdoc at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and is now a postdoc with James Xavier Prochaska at UC Santa Cruz.
• Lijun Gou (advisor Peter Mészáros) finished his PhD thesis in August 2007, completed two postocs at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and now holds a research faculty position at the National Astronomical Observatory of China in Beijing, China.

• Kyle Conlon and Ross Stouffer graduated in May 2012. Kyle is currently employed at the Swift Mission Operations Center in State College.
• Jacob Howell graduated in December 2010, and is now employed in Philadelphia.
• Andrew Shevchuk graduated with honors in June 2009, was named an NSF Graduate Fellow in astronomy at the University of Arizona, and is currently pursuing his PhD studies there.
• Lu Feng graduated with honors in June 2009, was named an NSF Graduate Fellow in physics at MIT, and is currently pursuing her PhD studies there.
• Ryan Letcavage graduated in June 2009, pursued graduate studies at UC Irvine, and is currently employed in California.

• Spring 2012: Astro 001 - The Astronomical Universe
• Fall 2012: Astro 451 - Astronomical Techniques

• The Astrophysical Multimessenger Observatory Network (AMON), a Penn State project recently proposed to NSF's Data Infrastructure Building Blocks (DIBBs) program (PI Douglas Cowen)
• Hubble ACS+WFC3 Revealing Virgo Intracluster Structure (HARVIST), a proposed Multicycle Treasury Program for the Hubble Space Telescope that would identify and characterize millions of individual red giant stars in the Virgo cluster (PI Robin Ciardullo)
• Galaxies and Black Holes in the Universe, a New Frontiers proposal to explore the evolution of entropy and complexity through cosmic time (PI Yuexing Li)
• The Palomar Transient Factory: Transients in the Local Universe and Core-Collapse Supernova projects
• Gemini TOO Observations of Gamma-Ray Bursts (ongoing)
• Hobby-Eberly Telescope Observations of Gamma-Ray Burst Afterglows (ongoing)
• 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

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 Photometric Redshift of z ~ 9.4 for GRB 090429B, A. Cucchiara et al. 2011, ApJ, 736, 7
• 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, 730, 134
• 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