Sheehan, Zhong, Woods elected American Geophysical Union Fellows

Anne Sheehan

Shijie Zhong

Tom Woods

Three CU-Boulder scientists recently were elected American Geophysical Union Fellows. The honorees are:  Anne Sheehan, professor in the Department of Geological Sciences; Shijie Zhong, professor in the Department of Physics; and Senior Research Associate Tom Woods of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.

The 2014 AGU Fellows were honored for their “exceptional scientific contributions and attained acknowledged eminence” in the fields of Earth and space sciences.

Sheehan, also a member of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, studies the crust and upper mantle of Earth and its relation to tectonic deformation. She is involved in ongoing projects in Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming and New Zealand.  She and her team regularly deploy portable seismometers that record both distant and local earthquakes, and recently placed seismometers in the Greeley region following an earthquake there.

Zhong studies the physical processes that control the evolution of the terrestrial planets like the Earth, moon and Mars, including using high-resolution gravity and topography data obtained via space exploration. The primary goal is to understand how the physical processes at work on terrestrial planets are related to their thermal evolution.

Woods studies the violent effects of the sun on near-Earth space weather that can affect satellites, power grids and ground communications systems. He currently is the principal investigator on a $32 million orbiting instrument package built at LASP flying on NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory that is helping scientists better understand rapid fluctuations in the sun’s extreme ultraviolet output in order to make better space weather predictions.

Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the AGU is dedicated to advancing the Earth and space sciences for the benefit of humanity through its scholarly publications, conferences and outreach programs. AGU is a not-for-profit scientific organization representing more than 62,000 members in 142 countries.

The new AGU Fellows will be honored in December as part of the 2014 AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco.

Four other AGU Fellows were elected from Colorado earlier in 2014, all from Boulder. They are: Clara Deser and Gerald Meehl from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, David Parrish from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Joseph Borovsky from the Space Science Institute.