Donald P. Schneider, Distinguished Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, has been appointed as head of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Penn State's Eberly College of Science. Schneider succeeds Lawrence W. Ramsey, whose primary research interest is observational cosmology, perhaps is best known for three of his accomplishments: He developed a new technique to measure distances to galaxies; he was the first to detect Comet Halley as it approached Earth in 1982, at a greater distance than any comet had ever been detected up to that time; and he has broken his own and others' records numerous times in the discovery of the most-distant known object in the universe.

Schneider now is particularly interested in finding and determining the properties of distant quasars, which are thought to be massive black holes that are swallowing stars as they venture to close to the black hole. He uses optical telescopes as time machines to view the distant past, when the universe was only a small fraction of its current size and age.