Richard V. E. Lovelace
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Richard V. E. Lovelace | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Lovelace in 2004 | |
| Alma mater | Washington University in St. Louis, Cornell University |
| Known for | Discovery of the period of the pulsar in the Crab Nebula (Crab Pulsar) |
| Children | Two |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | Cornell University |
| Thesis | Theory and analysis of interplanetary scintillations |
Richard Van Evera Lovelace is an American astrophysicist and plasma physicist. He is best known for the discovery of the period of the pulsar in the Crab Nebula (Crab Pulsar), which helped to prove that pulsars are rotating neutron stars, for developing a magnetic model of astrophysical jets from galaxies, and for developing a model of Rossby waves in accretion disks. He organized a US-Russia collaboration in plasma astrophysics, which focused on modeling of plasma accretion and outflows from magnetized rotating stars.
Lovelace is the son of city planner Eldridge Lovelace and Marjorie Van Evera Lovelace.[1][2] He graduated from Washington University in St. Louis in 1964 with a BS in physics and after receiving a National Science Foundation fellowship earned his PhD from Cornell University in 1970, also in physics,[3] with a dissertation titled Theory and analysis of interplanetary scintillations.[4]
Career
Lovelace began his career as a research associate at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and the Cornell University Laboratory of Plasma Studies. In 1972 he became an assistant professor at Cornell, and in 1984 a full professor. He spent a year as a visiting scientist at the Princeton University Plasma Physics Laboratory in the 1970s and in 1990 was a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin on a Guggenheim Fellowship.[5] He was elected an overseas fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge University, and visiting scientist at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, and in 1999 was Orsan Anderson Visiting Scholar at Los Alamos National Laboratory.[6] He has a joint appointment at Cornell in the Astronomy and Applied Engineering Physics departments, and directed the Master of Engineering Program from 1991 to 2000.[citation needed] He was awarded the Excellence in Teaching Prize of the engineering honor society Tau Beta Pi in 1988.[citation needed]
He became a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2000, was divisional associate editor for Physical Review Letters for Plasma Physics from 1997 to 2000, in 2003 became associate editor of Physics of Plasmas,[6] and in 2010 became an editorial board member of Journal of Computational Astrophysics and Cosmology.[7] He was a member of the James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics committee of the American Physical Society in 2009-2011 and a member of the Advisory board of the Guggenheim Fellowship Foundation from 1994 to 2005.[3]
