Jim Houck is Principal Investigator for the InfaRed Spectrograph (IRS) on the Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF) that was launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida on August 25, 2003. He pioneered the use of mid-infrared spectrometers to determine the physical conditions inside a wide variety of astronomical objects - from the giant planet Jupiter to distant galaxies. Early in his career he built infrared instruments launched on sounding rockets for brief, five minute peaks at the sky from above the atmosphere. Among the results from that work were the first discovery of the very high luminosities of star forming regions in our galaxy. These results were challenged in the literature until they were solidly confirmed by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) more than ten years later.

Houck was a member of the science team that launched IRAS in 1983. IRAS operated for 100 days - a far shorter lifetime than is predicted for SIRTF. Using IRAS data, Jim discovered a large class of sources which are very faint in the optical but bright in the infrared. These sources are distant galaxies powered by a combination of starburst activity and accretion of matter onto a central massive black hole. Galaxy collisions, or mergers, are often associated with these sources.

Jim's immediate plan for SIRTF is to use the IRS to diagnose the physical conditions in Blue Compact Galaxies - nearby analogs of the building blocks of young galaxies in the early Universe. He expects to determine the composition and sizes of the dust particles responsible for the infrared radiation.

He led the Cornell development of state-of-the-art instrumentation for the 5-meter telescope at the Palomar Observatory. The first major instrument developed at Cornell for Palomar was SpectroCam, a thermal infrared camera and spectrograph operating at the diffraction limit of the telescope.