Station

Robert A. Schommer (December 9, 1946 – December 12, 2001) was an American observational astronomer. He was a professor at Rutgers University and later a project scientist for the U.S. office of the Gemini Observatory Project at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile. He was known for his wide range of research interests, from stellar populations to cosmology.

Robert Schommer was born in Chicago, Illinois to Harvey and Bea Schommer. He received a B.A. in Physics 1970 from the University of Chicago in 1970 and a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Washington in 1977, where he continued for one year as instructor. Following two years in seminary college in Chicago, he held postdoctoral positions at Caltech (Chaim Weizmann Fellow), the Hale Observatories, the University of Chicago, and Cambridge University (NATO Postdoctoral Fellow) before joining the Department of Physics at the State University of New Jersey. He became increasingly unhappy with the Department's unwillingness to support astronomy, and in 1990 he moved to CTIO in Chile where he remained until his death in 2001.