FW: Montana State physicist Dana Longcope elected to National Academy of Sciences

BOZEMAN — A Montana State University researcher known as a creative and prolific physicist has received one of science’s greatest honors in recognition of his work to understand solar flares and other magnetic behavior of the sun.

Dana Longcope, professor in and head of the Department of Physics in MSU’s College of Letters and Science, has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, joining MSU’s Joan Broderick among this year’s 120 inductees announced Tuesday. They are the only incoming members from the five-state region of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming and the Dakotas.

“To be elected to the National Academy of Sciences is one of the ultimate career accomplishments of any faculty member with a scholarly career in the sciences,” said Jason Carter, MSU’s vice president for research, economic development and graduate education. “Dana’s contributions to the astrophysics community are impressive and impactful, and the best part of this honor is the recognition by his world-class peers.”

NAS was established by congressional charter in 1863 to provide objective, independent advice to the nation on matters of science and technology. Of its roughly 2,900 current members, about 190 have won Nobel prizes. Cathy Whitlock, inducted in 2018, is the only other MSU scientist to have been elected.

“I’m thrilled to have this recognition,” Longcope said. “It’s quite humbling and a big surprise.”

“Dana is both a great scientist and a great leader in the astrophysics community,” said Yves Idzerda, dean of the College of Letters and Science. “His research has provided insight about the sun’s corona, while his leadership has helped set the priorities for the science community. The students at MSU greatly benefit from his willingness to work and mentor them in such an exciting area.”

As one of the original members of MSU’s internationally recognized Solar Physics Group, Longcope has played a central role over the past two decades in securing MSU’s reputation as a leader in the field. In nominating him for the NAS’s Arctowski Medal that he received last year, his MSU physics colleagues Charles Kankelborg, Jiong Qiu and Neil Cornish described him as a “creative and prolific physicist” whose work has had widespread impact.

While emitting life-giving sunlight to Earth, the sun is a violent swirl of charged gases made white-hot by nuclear fusion and generating a powerful and chaotic magnetic field, the focus of Longcope’s research. Cornish has described Longcope’s work as “bringing order to chaos” through “elegant models” that seek to describe how the ever-shifting magnetic field lines caused by the sun’s rotation build up and then release huge amounts of energy in the form of solar flares that can destroy satellites, disrupt the electrical grid and cause the aurora.

After earning his bachelor’s and then doctorate at Cornell University in 1993, Longcope was a postdoctoral researcher studying solar flares when he caught word that Loren Acton — a Montana native who grew up in Lewistown, graduated from MSU and had a 29-year career at Lockheed Martin that culminated with flying on a NASA space shuttle mission to study the sun’s atmosphere and magnetic field — was returning to Bozeman to establish a solar physics research program. “People told me, ‘You’ll want to be part of that. They’re building a great group,’” Longcope said. “And it turned out to be exactly like that.” He arrived at MSU in 1996.

Since then, Longcope has served alongside NAS members on multiple national committees, authoring reports to inform Congress about the importance of understanding and predicting solar flares. A major report he contributed to in 2013 recommended that NASA develop a probe that would fly through the sun’s corona — the outer atmosphere where solar flares occur — to take measurements. The mission launched in 2018 and has already performed multiple, ever-nearer fly-bys of the sun, using Venus’s gravity to bend its orbit back toward the star before using the sun’s gravity to accelerate to speeds up to 430,000 mph, making the probe the fastest-ever man-made object. It is named for Eugene N. Parker, formerly a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago and NAS member, who died in March, so the occasion of Longcope’s induction to the academy is bittersweet, he said.

The Parker mission is part of a growing investment in solar physics, so now is an interesting time to serve on NAS, Longcope said. “It’s an important job, helping guide how Congress invests in science,” he said. With regard to solar physics, “there’s still so much we don’t understand, and there’s a range of implications that affect the national interest in terms of satellites, the electrical grid and so on.”

Longcope was the recipient in 2000 of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government to outstanding scientists and engineers beginning their independent careers. He was awarded the Karen Harvey Prize by Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society in 2003. At MSU, he received the Cox Faculty Award for Creative Scholarship and Teaching in 2006.

“It’s wonderful to be able, every day, to work on solving these scientific puzzles,” Longcope said. “I love having mysteries that I don’t fully understand. When you make a bit of progress, you’re the first person who’s been able to understand something in that way. Then you get to communicate that to students, so they understand they can do science like this too. It’s very satisfying.”

 

This story is available on the Web at: http://www.montana.edu/news/22083