David C. Jewitt is a British-American astronomer who studies the minor bodies of the Solar System. He is a distinguished professor of the Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences and the director of the Institute for Planets and Exoplanets at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He obtained his B.Sc. in astronomy from the University of London in 1979, and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in planetary science and astronomy from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1980 and 1983, respectively. He then worked as an assistant Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1983 to 1988, and as an associate astronomer and associate professor at the University of Hawaii from 1988 to 1993. He became an Astronomer and Professor at the University of Hawaii in 1993, and remained there until 2009, when he joined UCLA. He is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is best known for discovering (15760) Albion, the first Kuiper belt object (other than Pluto and its largest moon Charon) to be detected, along with his former student Jane X. Luu. In 2012, he and Luu received the Shaw Prize in astronomy and the Kavli Prize in astrophysics, for their “discovery and characterization of trans-Neptunian bodies, an archaeological treasure dating back to the formation of the solar system and the long sought source of short period comets”. He is also a Foreign Member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. To date he has published over 200 peered-reviewed papers.