William Henry Press (born May 23, 1948) is an astrophysicist, theoretical physicist, computer scientist, and computational biologist. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Council on Foreign Relations. In 1989, he was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society "in recognition of important theoretical contributions to relativistic astrophysics and to cosmology" Other honors include the 1981 Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy. Press has been a member of the JASON defense advisory group since 1977 and is a past chair.
From 2009 through 2016, Press served as vice-chair of President Obama's President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). In 2012–2013, he served as the 165th President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In July, 2016, he became the elected treasurer of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and a member of its council and governing board.
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Early life and education
The son of geophysicist Frank Press, and a schoolteacher mother and administrator who "loved teaching science to kids, Press attended public schools in Pasadena, California, graduating from Pasadena High School in 1965.
Press identified his early educational experience as having specifically benefited from the boons of the post WWII educational drive and the sexism of that same era, when "women were limited in their career choices, and many smart women became schoolteachers," and WWII veterans, "who had gone to college on the GI Bill of Rights ... saw public-school teaching as an upwardly mobile profession."