His mother was Rosalie Clara Grubber (née Hirschfelder), a housewife of German Jewish descent, and his father was Gösta Carl Åkerlöf, a chemist and inventor, who was a Swedish immigrant.
[3] Akerlof initially studied the strong and electromagnetic interactions of elementary particles in a number of experiments at the Cornell electron synchrotron, Argonne National Laboratory, Fermilab and the Stanford Linear Accelerator.
[9] With the goal of encouraging other nations to find effective paths to interesting and affordable astrophysics research, he has visited a number of countries including China, Iran, South Africa and Thailand.
His most significant contribution in this area is the ROTSE Collaboration which has built and operated four robotic optical telescopes on four continents in Australia, the United States, Namibia and Turkey.
[1] Akerlof is best known for his work in establishing the feasibility of real time searches for optical transients and the subsequent observations of a large number of gamma-ray bursts and supernovae.