Richard V. E. Lovelace
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. Early life and education Lovelace is the son of city planner Eldridge Lovelace and Marjorie Van Evera Lovelace. 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, with a dissertation titled Theory and analysis of interplanetary scintillations. 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