Donald Gurnett
Age: 70. Astrophysicist for 25 spacecraft, author or co-author of more than 450 publications, nationally recognized teacher and researcher in the University of Iowa Department of Physics and Astronomy since 1965. Now Carver/Van Allen Professor of Physics, the Cedar Rapids native first earned an electrical engineering degree at UI (1962), working on spacecraft electronics for Professor James Van Allen while a student, then earned master’s and doctorate (1965) in physics at UI, and took two-year NASA training at Stanford. He spent a year at Max Planck Institute in Germany, another as UCLA visiting professor, and has supervised 50 master’s and Ph.D. thesis projects at UI.