Manuel Peimbert

Manuel Peimbert Sierra (born June 9, 1941) is a Mexican astronomer and a faculty member at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He was named a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences in 1987.

Peimbert was born in 1941 in Mexico City.^[1] In his first year of college at UNAM, Peimbert went to the Tonantzintla Observatory in Puebla with a friend, Gerardo Bátiz, and they told the observatory director, Guillermo Haro, that they wanted to help at the observatory. Haro put them to work with a Schmidt camera, and Peimbert and Bátiz found a number of planetary nebulae, ten of which had never been described. They were later named the Peimbert-Bátiz nebulae, and subsequent study with astronomer Rafael Costero identified fourteen more.^[2]

After earning an undergraduate physics degree from UNAM, Peimbert completed a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley before returning to UNAM as a faculty member. He works at the UNAM Institute of Astronomy.^[3] From 1982 to 1988, Peimbert was vice president of the International Astronomical Union.^[4]

In 1987, Peimbert was elected a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences.^[5] He was inducted into the Colegio Nacional in Mexico in 1993.^[6] Peimbert was named a fellow of the Third World Academy of Sciences,^[7] and he was awarded one of the three TWAS Medal Lectures the first year they were held (1996).^[8] He received the Hans Bethe Prize from the American Physical Society in 2012.^[3] Peimbert and his wife, fellow UNAM faculty member Silvia Torres-Peimbert, were the first non-U.S. scientists to win the Hans Bethe Prize.^[9][10] Peimbert was elected an international member of the American Philosophical Society in 2002.^[11]

Peimbert is the great-grandson of writer Justo Sierra.^[12]