E. Sterl Phinney, professor of theoretical astrophysics at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif., will present a public lecture, "The Search for Black Holes," on the Cornell University campus April 15.

Phinney's talk, part of the first annual Edwin Salpeter Lectures, will be at 7:30 p.m. in the Space Sciences Building, Room 105. The lecture is free.

On April 12 Phinney will speak at a physics colloquium in Schwartz Auditorium of Rockefeller Hall at 4:30 p.m. on "LISA: A Gravitational Wave Detector Both Physicists and Astronomers Ought to Love." LISA refers to the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, which is being proposed for the detection of signals from massive black holes throughout the universe and from compact binaries throughout the galaxy. Phinney is chair of the LISA Mission Definition Team.

Phinney is a 1980 graduate of Caltech and was awarded his doctoral degree by Cambridge University in 1983. In 1995 he was awarded the Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy by the American Astronomical Society.

The Salpeter Lectureship was established in 1998 to honor Edwin E. Salpeter, the James Gilbert White Distinguished Professor in the Physical Sciences emeritus and a Cornell faculty member since 1935. In March, Salpeter was presented with the 1999 Hans A. Bethe Prize by the American Physical Society (APS). The APS cited Salpeter "for wide-ranging contributions to nuclear and atomic physics and astrophysics." In 1997, Salpeter was awarded the Crafoord Prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for his studies of chain reactions, including the "Salpeter process," which describes the energy process in older stars, responsible for the nuclear burning of helium to carbon, the crucial first step in the production of virtually all of the heavy elements in the universe.