UC San Diego Professor
Wins Astronomical Society Medal

May 5, 2009

By Susan Brown

Frank Shu

Astrophysicist Frank Shu, a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego will receive the 2009 Catherine Wolfe Bruce Gold Medal for a lifetime of achievement in astronomy, the Astronomical Society of the Pacific announced May 1.

“It was a great pleasure to learn of Frank winning the Bruce Medal,” said Mark Thiemens, dean of the Division of Physical Sciences at UC San Diego who works in related fields. “I have known his work intimately over the years, and he has always been a scientific hero to me. Its great and fitting that he has received this recognition.”

Shu has made paradigm-shifting contributions to our understanding of how astronomical structures such as stars and spiral galaxies form. His work on the origins of stars over a span of 30 years has generated a comprehensive and widely accepted theory that explains the main events in the birth and evolution of a star from the collapse of a cloud of molecules, to the accretion of a magnetized disk of material from which planets form to the appearance of jets and other outflows from a star system.

The theory Shu and his students developed also predicted that comets, once thought to form from pristine materials in the coldest regions of interplanetary space, would contain bits of rock highly transformed by heat. Their unconventional view, put forth in 1996, was confirmed a decade later with the return of dust samples from Comet Wild.

Shu received a bachelor’s degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1963 and a PhD in astronomy from Harvard University in 1968. He has served on the faculties of SUNY Stony Brook and UC Berkeley. From 2002-2006, Shu served as president of National Tsing Hua University of Taiwan. He joined the faculty at UC San Diego as a distinguished professor of physics in 2006 and also holds the title of University Professor, a system-wide honor reserved for scholars of international distinction who are recognized as teachers of exceptional ability.

The Astronomical Society of the Pacific will present the medal at the annual meeting in Millbrae, California in September.

Media Contact: Susan Brown, 858-246-0161, sdbrown@ucsd.edu