Bruce Margon is the Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He also holds an appointment as Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at UCSC. As Vice Chancellor, Margon provides executive leadership and coordination for campus-wide research administration and planning. Previous to his arrival at Santa Cruz in 2006, he was the Associate Director for Science at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, MD (the center that operates the science program of the Hubble Space Telescope) , and also spent 20 years as Professor and Chairman of the Astronomy Department at the University of Washington, Seattle.

Margon received his undergraduate degree in astrophysics at Columbia University, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in astronomy from University of California, Berkeley. In 1981, Dr. Margon was the recipient of the Newton Lacy Pierce Prize of the American Astronomical Society, presented to an individual for outstanding achievement in observational astronomical research. He has also been elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1985) and of the American Physical Society (1991). Dr. Margon's research interests include X-ray and ultraviolet astronomy, the late stages of stellar evolution, and quasi- stellar objects.

Margon was a Co-Investigator on the Hubble Space Telescope project, serving as a member of a team that designed and built one of the telescope's original light sensing instruments, the Faint Object Spectrograph. He has chaired the Board of Directors of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. (AURA), and the Astrophysical Research Consortium, Inc. (ARC), non-profit consortia of universities that build and operate major astronomical facilities, including ground-based observatories as well as the Hubble Space Telescope. Margon has also served as the Scientific Director of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a project currently in progress to provide the first-ever comprehensive digital map of the celestial sphere, using a special-purpose telescope in New Mexico. Margon has served on and chaired numerous scientific advisory committees on space science for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Dr. Margon is the author of more than two hundred research papers in professional journals, and also a frequent contributor on astronomical topics to the popular press, including Scientific American and Sky and Telescope. He has also appeared in the print and broadcast media frequently as a commentator to interpret astronomical findings for the public.