He was commissioned an officer in the U.S. Air Force at
Lackland Air Force Base in 1970, serving on active duty and in the reserves until 1986, after which he was honorably discharged at the rank of captain. He took leave from academia in 1986 at
MIT Lincoln Laboratory as staff physicist working on ballistic missile defense amidst occasional consulting and advising for many years with the military-intelligence community.[17] He spent sabbaticals in 1996 as visiting scholar and national lecturer for
Phi Beta Kappa and in 2018 working on solar energy as visiting professor at
University of Notre Dame and Distinguished Fellow at its Institute for Advanced Study.[18]
Awards
Chaisson’s research and writing have won several awards, such as the 1977 B.J. Bok Prize[19] for “original radio-astronomy discoveries,” the 1980 Smith-Weld Prize[20] for “best article by a Harvard faculty member,” a certificate of recognition from
NASA with U.S. flag flown aboard the STS-31 mission for “contributions made to the
Hubble Space Telescope program,”[21][22] as well as unsought fellowships from the
Sloan Foundation and the
National Academy of Sciences.
^"Inside Cool Interstellar Clouds," Nature, p311, October 6, 1972
^ "Gaseous Nebulas", E. Chaisson, Scientific American, pp164-180, December 1978
^”Black Hole Reportedly Detected at Core of the Milky Way Galaxy,” W. Sullivan, New York Times, p24, March 15, 1979
^Harvard Astronomer Announces Find of Possible Black Hole at Milky Way Galaxy's Core," The Harvard Crimson, March 16, 1979
^Big History and the Future of Humanity, Spier, F., Wiley-Blackwell, London, 2011
^”Energy Flows in Low-Entropy Complex Systems,” E. Chaisson, Entropy, v 17, pp8007-8018, 2015
^”The Other Global Warming,” B. Venkataraman, Boston Sunday Globe, page 1, January 25, 2009
^”The Heat to come . . .” E. Chaisson, New Scientist, pp24-25, April 4, 2009
^”How clean is green?” A. Ananthaswamy, New Scientist, pp35-38, January 28, 2012
^”The Ascent of Life,” M. Chorost, New Scientist, pp35-37, January 21, 2012
^"A Unifying Concept for Astrobiology," E. Chaisson, International Journal of Astrobiology, v 2, p 91, 2003.
^”Unnecessary Complexity,” D. McShea, Science, v 342, pp1319-1320, 2013
^"Rhythm of the Cosmos: Finding Unity among the Natural Sciences", E. Chaisson, Tufts Magazine, pp 16-22, Spring, 2001.
^The 13th Labor: Improving Science Education: A collection of essays from a workshop at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, T-C. Kim and E. Chaisson (eds.), Gordon&Breach Publishers, 1999
^Astronomy Today, Chaisson, E. and S. McMillan, Pearson, 9 editions, 1993-2018
^"Military Planners View the Shuttle As Way to Open Space for Warfare," Lyons, R., New York Times, p34, March 29, 1981
Cosmic evolution web site (containing text, images, animations, movies, and hyperlinked references of interest to both non-scientists {Introductory Track} and professional scientists {Advanced Track}).
A 60-minute video interview with PBS-Science for the Public 2014:
WGBH Forum
Representative samples of recent research articles:
Current Research