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Bartholomeus Jan Bok
Bartholomeus Jan Bok, better known as Bart Bok, was born in 1906 in the Netherlands and educated at the Universities of Leiden and Groningen, earning his doctorate at the latter under P.J. van Rhijn.
He worked at Harvard University from 1929 - 1957. For the next nine years, he directed the Mt. Stromlo Observatory in Australia. He returned to the United States in 1966, to become the director of the Steward Observatory of the University of Arizona. He held this position from 1966 until 1970.
In the early 1940s Bok helped to set up the National Observatory of Mexico at Tonantzintla. In the 1950s, he performed a similar job for Harvard’s southern station in South Africa. In Australia he helped establish the Siding Spring Observatory.
Dr. Bok worked closely with his wife, a fellow astronomer, Priscilla Fairfield Bok, whom he married in 1929. Together they studied the structure and evolution of star clusters and the Galaxy. Bok mapped the spiral arms of the Milky Way, especially the Carina region, and the Magellanic Clouds.
Bok initiated radio astronomy at Harvard and promoted it elsewhere. His investigations of interstellar gas and dust led to studies of star formation, and he became known for his work on small dark nebulae, which are now called Bok globules.
He became a US citizen in 1938. He died in 1983.