Professor William Hubbard was named the recipient of the Eighth Annual Professor Leon and Pauline Blitzer Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Physics and Related Sciences (PDF). Charles Blitzer presented Professor Hubbard with the award at a special afternoon program held on February 28, 2013. Professor Hubbard's award lecture was titled "Why Do We Have a Space Program?" A reception followed in the Kuiper Space Sciences atrium.

Bill Hubbard earned his B.A. from Rice University (Physics, 1962) and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley (Astronomy, 1967), with a doctoral dissertation on the properties of dense stellar matter. During a postdoctoral appointment at Caltech, he found that his research had implications for the internal structure of Jupiter. He joined LPL in 1972 after accepting Gerard Kuiper's offer of helping to establish a graduate program in the brand-new Department of Planetary Sciences. From 1977 to 1981, Hubbard was Director of LPL and Head of the Department of Planetary Sciences. In 2005, Professor Hubbard joined the Juno mission team; Juno, which lauched in 2011, is scheduled for Jupiter orbit insertion in 2016. As a co-investigator, Hubbard will share responsibility for analysis of Juno gravity data. Professor Hubbard is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2005 he received the Gerard P. Kuiper Prize of the Division for Planetary Sciences, American Astronomical Society. Asteroid 11216 “Billhubbard” was named in his honor.

The Blitzer Award is funded through the Blitzer Teaching Award Fund, and commemorates Professor Leon Blitzer and his wife, Pauline Meyer Blitzer.