Interview with John Hawley, John D. Hamilton Professor of Astronomy, and Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia. Hawley discusses his responsibilities as Associate Dean and he conveys his ongoing interest in black hole observational work and in the future findings of the James Webb Telescope. He reflects on his career’s overlap with the rise of computational astrophysics and he explains why he is agnostic on the hypothetical value of quantum computing to the field. He recounts his childhood in Maryland, then Kansas, and then northern California, in support of his father’s work as a minister, and he describes his undergraduate education at Haverford where he developed his interest in astronomy. Hawley explains his decision to work with Larry Smarr as his advisor at the University of Illinois, and he describes the origins of the Supercomputing Center. He describes the opportunities that led to him to Caltech to work with Roger Blandford, who was working on jets and active galaxies, and where he pursued synergies between analytic and computational analyses of black hole research. Hawley emphasizes the proximity to NRAO that influenced his decision to accept an offer from UVA, and he discusses his foundational collaboration with Steven Balbus on accretion disks. He explains his motivation to write the textbook Foundations of Modern Cosmology, what it was like to win the Shaw Prize, and how his administrative responsibilities gradually and mostly overtook his research agenda. At the end of the interview, Hawley reflects on the complementary nature of his technical collaboration with Balbus, and why he thinks terms of numerical and analytical approaches as separate endeavors.
