Geoffrey William Marcy (born September 29, 1954 in St. Clair Shores, Michigan, U.S.) is an American astronomer. He was an early influence in the field of exoplanet detection, discovery, and characterization. Marcy was a professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, and an adjunct professor of physics and astronomy at San Francisco State University. Marcy and his research teams discovered many extrasolar planets, including 70 out of the first 100 known exoplanets and also the first planetary system around a Sun-like star, Upsilon Andromedae. Marcy was a co-investigator on the NASA Kepler mission. His collaborators have included R. Paul Butler, Debra Fischer and Steven S. Vogt, Jason Wright, Andrew Howard, Katie Peek, John Johnson, Erik Petigura, Lauren Weiss, Lea Hirsch and the Kepler Science Team.
Marcy has held teaching and research positions, first at the Carnegie Institution of Washington (then the Mt. Wilson and Las Campanas Observatories) as a Carnegie fellow from 1982 to 1984. He then worked as an associate professor of physics and astronomy from 1984 to 1996 and then as a distinguished university professor from 1997 to 1999 at the San Francisco State University.
Marcy was a professor of astronomy and the Watson and Marilyn Alberts Chair for SETI at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1999 through 2015. From 2000 to 2012, he was the director of UC Berkeley's Center for Integrative Planetary Science. Marcy was also one of the project leaders of the Breakthrough Initiatives that will search for intelligent life in the universe, using large radio and optical telescopes.
Earlier, and as a pioneer in the study of extrasolar planets, Marcy has been featured prominently in the media, including Time magazine, The New York Times, Astronomy magazine and as a participant in various PBS Nova episodes: "Hunt for Alien Worlds" (1997), "Finding Life Beyond Earth" (2012), "Alien Planets Revealed" (2014); a BBC Horizon episode: "The Planet Hunters" (1996) and History Channel programs: The Universe (2007). Marcy was also featured on ABC News Nightline (October 20, 1995), The MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour (January 18, 1996), The David Letterman Show (April 12, 2001), a Planetary Radio interview (2007) and a National Academy of Sciences interview (2014).
