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Christopher Fulton McKee is an astrophysicist.
McKee attended Phillips Academy and Harvard University, and obtained a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1970 under advisor George B. Field. In 1974, he was appointed Professor of Physics and Astronomy, University of California at Berkeley. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has been chair of the UCB Physics Department. He is a former member and chairman of the NASA Astronomy and Astrophysics Survey Committee and former Director of the Space Sciences Laboratory at UCB.
McKee performed the first simulations of relativistic counter-streaming plasmas as part of his Ph.D. thesis at Berkeley. He began his study of the interstellar medium by pointing out the existence of reverse shocks in young supernova remnants, and he then analyzed the interaction of a supernova blast wave with interstellar clouds. Since joining the Physics and Astronomy Departments in Berkeley in 1974, he has devoted much of his research to studying processes in the interstellar medium, including evaporation of clouds, the structure of shock waves in atomic and molecular gas, and the dynamics of blast waves in both homogeneous and inhomogeous media. In collaboration with Jeremiah Ostriker, he developed the three-phase model of the interstellar medium, which has been widely used to organize and interpret observational data.
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