[LAF] Louis A. Frank, Ph.D.
Carver/James A. Van Allen Professor of Physics

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Vita

Dr. Frank was the Carver/James A. Van Allen Professor of Physics at The University of Iowa, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1964. His first professional research activities occurred in 1958 when he assisted Professor Van Allen in the calibration of the first U. S. lunar probes, Pioneers 3 and 4, as an undergraduate student. Since then he has been an experimenter, co-investigator, or principal investigator for instruments on forty-two spacecraft. The types of instrumentation include those for energetic charged particles, plasmas, and auroral imaging. He has been, or currently is, the principal investigator for plasma instruments on fourteen spacecraft, including the Quadrispherical LEPEDEAs on two International Sun-Earth Explorers (ISEEs) and several Interplanetary Monitoring Platforms (IMPs). Dr. Frank is the principal investigator for the auroral imaging instruments for the Dynamics Explorer Mission, the plasma instrumentation for the Galileo Mission to Jupiter, the U. S. plasma instrumentation for the Japanese Geotail spacecraft, and the camera for visible wavelengths for the Polar spacecraft of the International Solar Terrestrial Physics (ISTP) Program. His publications encompass such topics as the first direct measurements of the terrestrial ring current and of the polar cusp, the current systems in Earth's magnetotail, the plasma tori at Jupiter and at Saturn, and global imaging of Earth's auroral zones and atmosphere. Dr. Frank's current research interests are directed toward magnetospheric plasmas in the vicinity of Earth, wave-plasma instabilities, active experiments in the ionosphere, interpretation of auroral images in terms of global convection and current systems, the Jovian magnetosphere and its relationship with the Galilean satellites, computed tomography, geocoronal hydrogen, comets, and optics. He has served on various NASA and NAS/NRC committees and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the American Astronomical Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science and the International Academy of Astronautics. He is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and a recipient of the National Space Act Award.

On 16 May 2014 Dr. Louis A. Frank passed away and was buried in Iowa City, IA.

Education 	B. S.	1960 	(The University of Iowa)
		M. S. 	1961 	(The University of Iowa)
		Ph.D.	1964 	(The University of Iowa)

Last Modified: Thursday, 26-Sep-2024 18:46:23 CDT