Alan Stern and Me
It’s been a big year for Alan Stern. He has been named one of the 100 most influential people by Time magazine, his New Horizons mission to Pluto is well on its way, having completed a very successful flyby of Jupiter, and he has been named Associate Administrator for Science of NASA. This is following the establishment of the Boulder office of the Southwest Research Institute, now a leading center for planetary science.
But few people realize that his biggest honor was getting his Ph.D. in the same class as me, back in December 1989 from the Department of Astrophysical, Planetary, and Atmospheric Sciences (now just Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences) at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Getting his Ph.D. at the same time as me was such an incentive to Alan that he managed to finish grad school in just three years and one semester, having started a full year after me (that’s fast: only one other person in my class of a dozen graduated as early as I did, a full year longer than Alan). Since then he’s published roughly three papers for every one of mine (and had three children for every one of mine). Yes, our careers have followed slightly different trajectories since 1989, but oddly enough we’re both leaving the comfortable climes of Boulder this year for the muggy air of the East: Alan to D.C. and me to Orlando. In the brief time he’s been AA for Science at NASA there have already been some positive changes in communication between headquarters and the science community. I’m excited to see what comes next.
November 6th, 2007 at 9:23 pm
Thanks for the interesting note on Alan. He is a friend of mine from high school in Dallas.