Dr. Justin Crepp - Teaching
Dr. Justin Crepp is a 1998 graduate of Beaver Falls High School. A well-rounded youth while growing up in Beaver Falls, Crepp was interested in sports, music and art. Whatever he pursued he did well. He entered and won local billiard tournaments and at the age of 14, ranked seventh in the nation as a pool player. In addition, he learned to play piano without having a lesson. During his years at Beaver Falls High School he quarterbacked the Tiger Football team under Coach Judge Richard Mancini and also played baseball. Dr. Crepp credits Rodney Bobin, the Director of Technology for Big Beaver Falls Area School District, as someone who encouraged his interest in science at an early age.
Dr. Crepp completed his undergraduate studies at Penn State University and earned a Doctorate in Astrophysics from the University of Florida. His post-doctoral work was completed at Caltech. Dr. Crepp was recently named a Kepler Participating Scientist, one of an elite group of eleven (11) in the country tasked to further the research of the Kepler Science Center’s mission to discover habitable planetary systems.
As a Kepler Participating Scientist, Dr. Crepp played a major role in discovering habitable planetary systems and developing a new Doppler Spectrometer to help locate and identify them. NASA named him as a member of The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) team. TESS is set to launch in 2017 and will discover thousands of exoplanets in orbit around the brightest stars in the sky.
Dr. Crepp is an Astrophysicist and Freimann Assistant Professor of Physics at the University of Notre Dame. At Notre Dame he designs and builds adaptable optics systems to detect and measure star companions.
His recent work with a research team at Caltech confirmed the first extra solar planet in a quadruple star system. Dr. Crepp provided high-contrast images of the distant objects circulating a planetary system called Kepler-62 and co-authored a paper about the discovery.