Jeremiah Ostriker is distinguished for contributions to many topics in astrophysics, including pulsars and black holes, cosmic rays, and how galaxies and quasars form and evolve. He was amongst the first to show that the observed form of galaxies suggests they have a halo of ‘dark matter’ — hypothetical, unobservable matter thought to make up most of the mass of the Universe.

Jeremiah is a leader in the area of computer-based numerical simulations of galactic and cosmological phenomena. Lately, he has used data from the NASA Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe spacecraft and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) to determine values of parameters in the current standard model of cosmology, which with Paul Steinhardt and others he was among the first to propose and codify.

For his role in initiating the SDSS project, which makes its data publicly available on the Web, he was named a White House Champion of Change. His many other awards include: the 1972 Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy of the American Astronomical Society; the 2000 US National Medal of Science; the Royal Astronomical Society’s Gold Medal (2004); and the 2012 James Craig Watson Medal of the US National Academy of Sciences.