This program is named for Stamatios “Tom” Krimigis, a visionary space scientist, inventor, leader, and mentor. Krimigis is the only scientist in the world who built instrumentation for and/or participated in space science missions to all nine classical planets and the Sun. He served as a science instrument principal investigator on five NASA missions, including the legendary Voyager missions and the Cassini orbiter to Saturn. Over the course of his career, Krimigis has designed, built, flown, and analyzed data from 21 instruments on various NASA and European Space Agency missions. He was also instrumental in establishing NASA’s principal-investigator-led approach to space science, including the creation of the Discovery and New Frontiers programs. He has published over 640 papers in peer-reviewed journals and books and has been cited over 27,000 times.

Born in Greece, Krimigis earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Minnesota and a master’s and doctorate in physics from the University of Iowa, studying under James Van Allen, the former APL scientist who discovered Earth’s radiation belts. He served on the faculty of the Physics and Astronomy Department at the University of Iowa before joining APL in 1968. During his time at APL, he headed the Space Physics and Instrumentation Group, became chief scientist in 1980, and became head of the Space Department (now the Space Exploration Sector) in 1991. In that role for more than a decade, Krimigis directed the activities of hundreds of scientists and engineers with a focus on space science and engineering.