St. Mary’s University distinguished alumnus and celebrated astrophysicist Giovanni G. Fazio, Ph.D., served as the keynote speaker at the 12th annual Fall Commencement Exercises on Saturday, December 15, 2012.

Fazio (B.S., B.A. ’54), a senior physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, pioneered the development of gamma-ray astronomy using balloon-borne telescopes and was the co-principal investigator for the gamma-ray detector experiment on NASA’s first Orbiting Solar Observatory.

He also was the principal investigator for the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) experiment on the Spitzer Space Telescope, one of NASA’s “Great Observatories.” The telescope was launched in 2003 and continues to produce spectacular images of the infrared universe.

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