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Steve Holland, Engineer/Extraterrestrial Rock Star

Steve Holland*Asteroid #40981 (1999 TL284)
Presented to: Stephen Holland, CCD Developer Extraordinaire

The Scientific Detector Workshop (SDW) is an international gathering of leaders in the development, production and implementation of various high performance detectors, from x-ray to infrared, for scientific applications. The 2013 SDW hosted 162 attendees from 90 different organizations, 18 countries, and 6 continents in Florence, Italy October 7-11, 2013.

During the workshop, Lifetime Achievement Awards were presented to recognize leaders in the Scientific Detector Workshop community who “made substantial and unique contributions over the course of their career”.  Stephen Holland, Senior Scientist/Engineer, was dubbed, “CCD Developer Extraordinaire” and presented Asteroid #40981, named in his honor, as an SDW Lifetime Achievement Award.

Stephen Holland is recognized as a pioneer in the development of high-performance silicon detectors for medical imaging, x-ray photon sciences, astronomy, and high-energy physics.  He led the development of thick, high resistivity p-channel CCDs that provide very high quantum efficiency in the near-infrared.  His CCDs operate in several observatories, including the dark energy camera (DECam) in Cerro Tololo, the BOSS spectrographs at Apache Point, the low-resolution spectrograph at the W.M. Keck Observatory, and exoplanet searches at Lick Observatory.

* Asteroid 40981 discovered October 9, 1999 by LINEAR at Socorro