Joseph Sweetman Ames

Joseph Sweetman Ames (July 3, 1864 – June 24, 1943) was a physicist, professor at Johns Hopkins University, provost of the university from 1926 to 1929, and university president from 1929 to 1935. He is best remembered as one of the founding members of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, the predecessor of NASA) and its longtime chairman (1919–1939). NASA Ames Research Center is named after him. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1905 and the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1909. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1911. He was the 1935 recipient of the Langley Gold Medal from the Smithsonian Institution.

Ames was also an assistant editor of The Astrophysical Journal and associate editor of the American Journal of Science; editor-in-chief of the Scientific Memoir Series; and editor of Joseph von Fraunhofer's memoirs on Prismatic and Diffractive Spectra (1898).