Nancy Crooker

Crooker was born in Chicago in 1944.  Her father, Michael Uss, a Lithuanian who emigrated to America as a child, was a foreman at the freight yards of the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad, and her mother, Helen Narovec, was a housewife.  

Crooker holds a BA in physics from Knox College, Illinois, and an MSc in Meteorology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).^[1][2] In 1972 Crooker was awarded her PhD in Atmospheric Sciences, also from UCLA, with her doctoral dissertation entitled, "The Low-Latitude Asymmetric Disturbance in the Geomagnetic Field".^[3]

Crooker has published 207 peer-reviewed articles (as of 8 October 2019)^[4] across a range of topics within space physics. Her early career was as a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University and then the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1970s. There, together with Joan Feynman in their seminal Nature paper,^[5] she was one of the first physicists to use geomagnetic data as a way to reconstruct solar activity prior to the space age.^[6] Crooker then developed the concept of anti-parallel merging of magnetic field lines in Earth's magnetosphere published in Journal of Geophysical Research in 1979.^[7]

In 1990, she returned to UCLA as an adjunct professor before making her final move to Boston University as a research professor in 1994.^[2] Around this time, Crooker switched focus from the magnetosphere to the heliosphere, in particular the interplanetary manifestations of coronal mass ejections. In 1997, she co-edited a monograph on coronal mass ejections.^[8] In 2002, she coined the term "interchange reconnection" for describing the dynamic process by which heliospheric magnetic flux introduced by coronal mass ejections is subsequently removed,^[9][10] a term which has been comprehensively adopted in the field.

Crooker was president of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Space Physics & Aeronomy Section from 2004 to 2006.^[11][12] She is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union,^[13] where the fellowship program recognizes AGU members who have made exceptional contributions to Earth and space science through a breakthrough, discovery, or innovation in their field.^[14] She also received the Eugene Parker Lecture award from the AGU in 2013, only the third woman to do so.^[15]

She has worked closely over decades with several other prominent space physicists, including John T. Gosling, Marcia Neugebauer, Mike Lockwood, Chris Russell and Thomas Zurbuchen.^[2]

Crooker has served on numerous committees, panels and taskforces throughout her career, including:

• AGU Fellows Program Review Task Force (2015)^[16][17]
• Founding member of the new executive board for the American Geophysical Union (2010)^[18]
• Media panel member for the NASA Ulysses spacecraft media telecon (2008)^[19]
• Working group leader, International Space Science Institute (ISSI) workshop on Co-rotating Interaction Regions (1998)^[20]
• Interviewed by CNN about solar storms (1997)^[21]
• Chair, AGU Awards Committee for Solar-Planetary Relations Section (1988-1990)^[22]

• The Eugene Parker Lecture is presented two out of every three years to a space scientist who has made significant contributions to the fields of solar and heliospheric science by the American Geophysical Union.^[15] Crooker received this honor in 2013.^[15]
• President of the AGU Space Physics & Aeronomy Section (2004 to 2006) ^[12]
• Member of the Solar Heliospheric and Interplanetary Environment (SHINE) Steering Committee (1995-2002)^[23]
• Solar Heliospheric Secretary for Space Physics & Aeronomy Section of AGU (2000-2002)
• Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (2000) ^[24][13]
• Member of the NASA Magnetospheric Management Operations Working Group (1995-6)^[25]
• Editor's Citation for Excellence in Refereeing for the Journal of Geophysical Research (1993)^[26] and Geophysical Research Letters (1996) ^[27]