![\"Bruce](\"\/\/casdev.unc.edu\/collegearchive\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/44\/2015\/07\/carney_bruce_10_008.jpg\")
<\/a>Even when Bruce Carney\u2019s feet were stuck in South Building, his heart longed for the stars.<\/p>\n
Carney joined Carolina\u2019s Department of Physics and Astronomy <\/a>as an assistant professor in 1980 and became a full professor in 1989. He was named Samuel Baron Professor of Physics and Astronomy in 1994.<\/span><\/p>\n Carney and his fellow astronomers spent 18 years cooking up a high-tech telescope called SOAR. They set the $30 million, 100-ton telescope atop Cerro Pachon, a dusty, 9,000-foot desert mountain in the Chilean Andes, where since 2004 it has continued to capture the highest quality images of any observatory in its class in the world. Carney wore the same necktie, printed with Van Gogh\u2019s \u201cStarry Night,\u201d to both the groundbreaking of the project and its official dedication.<\/p>\n In 2008, a newly appointed chancellor, Holden Thorp, called Carney to South Building \u2013 first as interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, then as interim provost while a national search was conducted.<\/p>\n Carney performed so well that Thorp suspended the search and Carney stayed in the post until Thorp stepped down as chancellor in 2013. Afterward, Carney returned to what had always been his true calling: astronomy.<\/p>\n As provost, Carney presided over campus budget decisions during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. To keep perspective, Carney kept on his desk a coal-colored meteorite. \u201cI keep it to remind myself that, here in this office, things will fall out of the sky.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Fred Brooks<\/strong><\/p>\n Born in Durham in 1931, Fred Brooks fell in love with computers at 13 reading about Harvard professor Howard Aiken in Time magazine.<\/p>\n Brooks would go on to earn his Ph.D. at Harvard under Aiken in the 1950s. In 1964, Brooks left IBM to come to Carolina to found what would end up being the second computer science department<\/a> in the country. <\/span><\/p>\n Brooks got the job after giving a lecture in which he laid out how there were legitimate research problems that were different from the concerns of engineering schools or mathematics.<\/p>\n Brooks recalled that lecture earlier this year as the department celebrated its 50th anniversary. \u201cIt got the honchos here \u2013 the heads of the science department who were in the audience \u2013 to say, \u2018You know, there might be something to that.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Brooks would go on to become one of the most influences honchos in Carolina history, serving as the chair of the department he founded for the next 20 years.<\/p>\n From day one, colleagues said, Brooks fostered a practically oriented, problem-solving department that attracted professors who were less interested in producing scholarly papers than they were in making products that people, including scientists in other departments, might find useful.<\/p>\n During his 50-year career, Brooks won the A.M. Turing Award, sometimes referred to as the Nobel Prize of computing, as well as the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. Brooks and Apple founder Steve Jobs were among the inaugural winners of the latter prize.<\/p>\n \u201cI tell high school students I picked the perfect career for the last half of the 20th century,\u201d Brooks said in a\u00a02014 interview. <\/span><\/p>\n Brooks pointed to the \u201cintersection of biology and computation\u201d as a career today\u2019s students should be considering, \u201cThe intellectual explosion that is going to come in the next 50 years is going to be incredible,\u201d Brooks said. \u201cAnd I tell them I would be riding that rocket.\u201d<\/p>\n James Peacock<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>