Martha P. Haynes

Academic career

Haynes graduated from Wellesley College in 1973 with a B.A. in physics and astronomy. She went to Indiana University Bloomington for graduate school. There she received her M.A. in 1975 and her Ph.D. in 1978. From 1978 until 1981 she worked at the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center when she left to become the assistant director for the Green Bank Telescope. She joined the faculty at Cornell in 1983. There she worked with collaborator Riccardo Giovanelli, using radio telescopes to map the distribution of galaxies in the Universe.

She was co-lead of the ALFALFA survey, having worked with the project (and its predecessor project, the ALFA survey) since the early 2000s.

Together with Riccardo Giovanelli, she worked on the development of the Cerro Chajnantor Atacama Telescope (CCAT) in the mid-1990s, which has led to the construction of the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope (FYST) on Cerro Chajnantor in northern Chile. She is (as of 2020) the chairman of the board of directors for the CCAT-project.