Chris Impey is a university distinguished professor of astronomy and associate dean of the College of Science at the University of Arizona. He has more than 180 refereed publications on observational cosmology, galaxies and quasars. He has won 11 teaching awards and has taught two online classes with more than 180,000 enrolled and 2 million minutes of video lectures watched. Impey is past vice president of the American Astronomical Society and has been a National Science Foundation distinguished teaching scholar, the Carnegie Council’s Arizona professor of the year and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute professor. He’s written more than 50 articles on cosmology and astrobiology, two introductory textbooks, a novel called “Shadow World” and eight popular science books: “The Living Cosmos,” “How It Ends,” “Talking About Life,” “How It Began,” “Dreams of Other Worlds,” “Humble Before the Void,” “Beyond: The Future of Space Travel” and “Einstein’s Monsters: The Life and Times of Black Holes.”