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James Richard Houck is the Kenneth A. Wallace Professor of Astronomy at Cornell University.
Houck pioneered infrared observational astronomy, designing detectors and spectrographs that were flown on sounding rockets in the 1960s, on airborne observatories in the 1970s, and the Infrared Astronomical Satellite in 1984 and the Spitzer Space Telescope in 2003. He also led development of Cornell's instrumentation for the Palomar Observatory Hale Telescope.
Houck's research outside instrumentation has focused on the mechanisms responsible for energy generation in Ultraluminous Infrared Galaxies, of which he was a discoverer using the IRAS satellite. Houck has also studied the formation of dust in the early Universe.
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