image: AGU to award the William Bowie Medal to NJIT's Louis Lanzerotti at AGU's upcoming fall meeting in San Francisco. view more
Credit: New Jersey Institute of Technology
Louis Lanzerotti, distinguished research professor of physics at NJIT, has been selected as the 2011 William Bowie Medalist of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). The presentation will be made at the Honors Ceremony at the 2011 AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco on December 7, 2011.
The Bowie Medal is AGU's highest honor. It was established in 1939 in honor of William Bowie for his "spirit of helpfulness and friendliness in unselfish cooperative research." Bowie was the first president of AGU (1920) and the first recipient of the medal. The Bowie medal, awarded annually, acknowledges an individual for outstanding contributions to fundamental geophysics and for unselfish cooperation in research, one of the guiding principles of AGU. Bowie was a distinguished geodesist who was not only one of the founders of the American Geophysical Union and the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics but was also an architect of international cooperation in geophysical research.
Lanzerotti has spent four and one-half decades contributing to research that includes studies of space plasmas and geophysics, and engineering problems related to the impact of atmospheric and space processes on terrestrial technologies, and those in space. Prior to joining NJIT in 2003, Lanzerotti spent more than three decades at Bell Laboratories-Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill, NJ.
U.S. President George W. Bush nominated Lanzerotti in 2004 to a six-year term on the National Science Board, the 24-member governing body of the National Science Foundation. Lanzerotti has served as the chair of many committees for the National Academies, including the blue-ribbon panel to study whether to prolong the mission of the Hubble Space Telescope, the committee on the safety and security of spent nuclear fuel, and the Space Studies Board. He currently serves as the chair of the Governing Board of the American Institute of Physics.
NASA has recognized Lanzerotti's contributions to science with the agency's Distinguished Scientific Achievement Medal, and twice awarded him the agency's Distinguished Public Service Medal. He has also received the William Nordberg Medal for applications of space science from the International Committee on Space Research (COSPAR). Lanzerotti has been elected to the International Academy of Astronautics and the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).
Lanzerotti has been principal investigator or co-investigator on a number of NASA Earth-orbiting, interplanetary and planetary missions including IMP, Voyager, Ulysses, Galileo, and Cassini. He is currently a Principal Investigator for instruments to be flown in 2012 on NASA's Radiation Belt Storm Probes mission in Earth's magnetosphere. Lanzerotti's research directed toward understanding Earth's upper atmosphere and space environments has also taken him to the Antarctic and the Arctic.
Minor Planet 5504 Lanzerotti recognizes his space and planetary research, and Mount Lanzerotti (74.50° S, 70.33° W) recognizes his research in the Antarctic. In 2003, the American Geophysical Union named Lanzerotti the founding editor of Space Weather, The International Journal of Research and Applications. The journal has been the first to focus on the emerging field of space weather and its impact on technical systems.
Lanzerotti has co-authored one book, co-edited four books, and is an author of more than 500 refereed engineering and science papers. He is a member of the NJIT Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research, which also manages the Big Bear Solar Observatory, Calif. Lanzerotti holds a BS in engineering physics from the University of Illinois and master's and doctoral degrees in physics from Harvard University.
NJIT, New Jersey's science and technology university, enrolls more than 9,558 students pursuing bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in 120 programs. The university consists of six colleges: Newark College of Engineering, College of Architecture and Design, College of Science and Liberal Arts, School of Management, College of Computing Sciences and Albert Dorman Honors College. U.S. News & World Report's 2010 Annual Guide to America's Best Colleges ranked NJIT in the top tier of national research universities. NJIT is internationally recognized for being at the edge in knowledge in architecture, applied mathematics, wireless communications and networking, solar physics, advanced engineered particulate materials, nanotechnology, neural engineering and e-learning. Many courses and certificate programs, as well as graduate degrees, are available online through the Office of Continuing Professional Education.