Newman joined the
University of Pittsburgh faculty in 1956, becoming
professor of physics in 1966. He was a visiting professor at Syracuse University in 1960/61 and at
King's College London, in 1964/65. In 1957 he served as consultant at
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. He also generalized the
Kerr metric developed by
Roy Kerr to include a charged body, resulting in the
Kerr–Newman metric. In 1973 he advocated the use of
complex numbers in relativity, and consideration of
complex spacetime. Some of his most interesting recent work has involved the problem of reconstructing the gravitational field within some region from observations of how optical images are
lensed as light rays pass through the region. In 2002 an email he forwarded to
John C. Baez helped to touch off the
Bogdanov Affair. Newman was selected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1972. In 2011, he was awarded the
Einstein Prize (APS) "for outstanding contributions to
theoretical relativity, including the
Newman–Penrose formalism,
Kerr–Newman solution, Heaven, and
null foliation theory, for his intellectual passion, generosity and honesty, which have inspired and represented a model for generations of relativists". ==Family==