William J Borucki was born in 1939 in Chicago, USA and is the Principal Investigator for NASA's Kepler Mission. He received a Master's degree in Physics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1962 and a Master's degree in Meteorology from San Jose State University, California in 1982. From 1962 until now, he has been working at NASA Ames Research Center as Space Scientist. Following his Master's degree in Physics, he moved to Silicon Valley, where he first worked on the development of the heat shields for the Apollo mission in the Hypersonic Free Flight Branch at NASA Ames. After the successful moon landings, he transferred to the Theoretical Studies Branch where he investigated lightning activity in planetary atmospheres and developed mathematical models to predict the effects of nitric oxides and chlorofluoromethanes on Earth's ozone layer. NASA's Kepler Mission was launched in March 2009 to hunt for exoplanets using transit photometry.