Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr.

His amateur radio accomplishments have included mounting an 'expedition' in April 2010 to use the Arecibo Radio Telescope to conduct moonbounce with Amateurs around the world using voice, Morse code, and digital communications.

Taylor was among the first group of MacArthur Fellows. He has served on many boards, committees, and panels, co-chairing the Decadal Panel of that produced the report Astronomy and Astrophysics in the New Millennium that established the United States's national priorities in astronomy and astrophysics for the period 2000–2010. He was a guest of honor in the 2009 International Physics Olympiad.

Taylor has used this first binary pulsar to make high-precision tests of general relativity. Working with his colleague Joel Weisberg, Taylor has used observations of this pulsar to demonstrate the existence of gravitational radiation in the amount and with the properties first predicted by Albert Einstein. He and Hulse shared the Nobel Prize for the discovery of this object. In 1980, he moved to Princeton University, where he was the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor in Physics, having also served for six years as Dean of Faculty. He retired in 2006.

In 1974, Hulse and Taylor discovered the first pulsar in a binary system, named PSR B1913+16 after its position in the sky, during a survey for pulsars at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Although it was not understood at the time, this was also the first of what are now called recycled pulsars: Neutron stars that have been spun-up to fast spin rates by the transfer of mass onto their surfaces from a companion star.

He received a B.A. in physics at Haverford College in 1963, and a Ph.D. in astronomy at Harvard University in 1968. After a brief research position at Harvard, Taylor went to the University of Massachusetts Amherst, eventually becoming Professor of Astronomy and Associate Director of the Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory.

Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr. (born March 29, 1941) is an American astrophysicist and Nobel Prize laureate in Physics for his discovery with Russell Alan Hulse of a "new type of pulsar, a discovery that has opened up new possibilities for the study of gravitation."