Dr Keith Arnaud is an Associate Research Scientist in the Astronomy Department of the University of Maryland and a staff member of NASA's High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC) at Goddard Space Flight Center. His main responsibilities at the HEASARC center on the analysis of energy spectra and particularly on the XSPEC program. XSPEC has been used in over 12,000 refereed publications over the last 30+ years and by astronomers on six continents.
Dr. Arnaud's scientific interests have covered clusters of galaxies, active galactic nuclei, astrostatistics, and computational methods. He is the author or co-author of over 70 refereed publications and his refereed and non-refereed publications have almost 13,000 citations with an h-index of 47.
In 2001 he co-founded a series of US X-ray astronomy schools intended for graduate students and young postdocs as an introduction to the practical side of X-ray astronomy. An outgrowth of these schools was a book "Handbook of X-ray Astronomy" published by Cambridge University Press for which Dr. Arnaud was lead editor. Also in 2001, Dr. Arnaud participated in the first COSPAR Capacity Building Workshop. These workshops are designed to build expertise in space-based science in countries and regions which may not currently have active programs. The first workshops covered X-ray astronomy but have since expanded to planetary and Earth sciences. COSPAR X-ray astronomy workshops have been held in Argentina, Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Mexico, and South Africa.
Dr. Arnaud was educated in the United Kingdom and has an undergraduate degree in mathematics and a PhD in astronomy, both from Cambridge University. In 1985 he moved to Cambridge MA with a Herchel Smith scholarship from Emmanuel College, Cambridge and followed that with a Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship. Dr. Arnaud joined the University of Maryland and GSFC in 1988. Working with the GSFC X-ray astronomy group he participated in the BBXRT experiment on the Astro-1 space shuttle mission and then in collaboration with colleagues in Japan on the ASCA, Suzaku, and Hitomi X-ray astronomy satellites.
Dr. Arnaud is a member of the American Astronomical Society and Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society From 2012 to 2019 he was treasurer of the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the AAS. He served on the COSPAR Committee on Capacity Building from 2006 to 2010, the National Academy of Sciences Decadal Survey Study Group on Computation and Data Handling in 2009, and on the Chandra Users' Committee from 1999 to 2002.
In 2022 Dr Arnaud was awarded the AAS High Energy Astrophysics Division Innovation Prize for "for continuous innovation in developing and maintaining XSPEC, the X-ray spectral fitting package, which has become the world standard for analysis of spectra from X-ray and Gamma-ray missions." Dr Arnaud also received the Astronomical Society of Japan Excellent Paper Award in 2012 for a paper on which he was a co-author (this is an award presented annually for the most outstanding paper published in PASJ). He has also received ten NASA or GSFC group achievement awards.
