He was commissioned an officer in the U.S. Air Force at Lackland Air Base in 1970, served on active duty and in the reserves mainly at Mildenhall RAF base and Hanscom USAF base until 1986, after which he was honorably discharged at the rank of captain. He took leave from academia in 1986 at MIT Lincoln Laboratory as staff physicist working on ballistic missile defense amidst occasional consulting and advising for many years with the military-intelligence community.[17] He spent sabbaticals in the 1980s at Wellesley and Haverford colleges, in 1996 was visiting scholar and national lecturer for Phi Beta Kappa, and in 2018 worked on solar energy as visiting professor at University of Notre Dame and Distinguished Fellow at its Institute for Advanced Study.[18]
Chaisson’s research and writing have won several awards, such as the 1977 B.J. Bok Prize[19] for “original radio-astronomy discoveries,” the 1980 Smith-Weld Prize[20] for “best article by a Harvard faculty member,” a 1990 (and 1994) certificate of recognition from NASA with U.S. flag flown aboard the Space Shuttle-31 mission for “exceptional performance on the Hubble Space Telescope program,”[21][22] as well as unsought fellowships from the Sloan Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences.
His 2018 election to the rank of AAAS Fellow noted his "research and teaching contributions to astrophysics, including co-authoring the nation's most widely used astronomy textbook." He was also a finalist nominee for the 2024 Smithsonian Secretary's national Achievement Award for "consistent and outstanding performance in educational programming that opens doors to lifelong learners, communities and educators elsewhere while serving the nation through distance learning, digital media, publications and exhibitions.”
In the 1990s, he co-produced and hosted the educational PBS (Maryland Intec) television series, Starfinder, highlighting Hubble Space Telescope discoveries and people, now freely available online at the American Archive of Public Broadcasting.[26]
^"Inside Cool Interstellar Clouds," Nature, p311, October 6, 1972
^ "Gaseous Nebulas", E. Chaisson, Scientific American, pp164-180, December 1978
^”Black Hole Reportedly Detected at Core of the Milky Way Galaxy,” W. Sullivan, New York Times, p24, March 15, 1979
^Harvard Astronomer Announces Find of Possible Black Hole at Milky Way Galaxy's Core," The Harvard Crimson, March 16, 1979
^Big History and the Future of Humanity, Spier, F., Wiley-Blackwell, London, 2011
^”Energy Flows in Low-Entropy Complex Systems,” E. Chaisson, Entropy, v 17, pp8007-8018, 2015
^”The Other Global Warming,” B. Venkataraman, Boston Sunday Globe, page 1, January 25, 2009
^”The Heat to come . . .” E. Chaisson, New Scientist, pp24-25, April 4, 2009
^”How clean is green?” A. Ananthaswamy, New Scientist, pp35-38, January 28, 2012
^”The Ascent of Life,” M. Chorost, New Scientist, pp35-37, January 21, 2012
^"A Unifying Concept for Astrobiology," E. Chaisson, International Journal of Astrobiology, v 2, p 91, 2003.
^”Unnecessary Complexity,” D. McShea, Science, v 342, pp1319-1320, 2013
^"Rhythm of the Cosmos: Finding Unity among the Natural Sciences", E. Chaisson, Tufts Magazine, pp 16-22, Spring, 2001.
^The 13th Labor: Improving Science Education: A collection of essays from a workshop at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, T-C. Kim and E. Chaisson (eds.), Gordon&Breach Publishers, 1999
^Astronomy Today, Chaisson, E. and S. McMillan, Pearson, 9 editions, 1993-2018
^"Military Planners View the Shuttle As Way to Open Space for Warfare," Lyons, R., New York Times, p34, March 29, 1981
Cosmic evolution web site (containing text, images, animations, movies, and hyperlinked references of interest to both non-scientists {Introductory Track} and professional scientists {Advanced Track}).
A 60-minute video interview with PBS-Science for the Public 2014: WGBH Forum
Representative samples of recent research articles: Current Research
