[SPA] SPA SECTION NEWSLETTER, Volume XXIX, Issue 27

[Newsletter Editor]

AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION
SPA SECTION NEWSLETTER
Volume XXIX, Issue 27
Apr.28,2022

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Table of Contents

1. In Memoriam: Professor George Leonard Siscoe

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Announcement Submission Website: http://goo.gl/forms/qjcm4dDr4g


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In Memoriam: Professor George Leonard Siscoe

From: Nancy Crooker (crooker at bu.edu)

On April 9, 2022, George Leonard Siscoe, Professor Emeritus of UCLA and Boston University, died of lymphoma at the age of 84.

Born in 1937 in Lansing, Michigan, George Siscoe received his bachelor’s (1960) and doctorate (1964) degrees in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  In 1968, after a postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology and an Assistant Professorship of Physics at MIT, he joined the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at UCLA.  While serving as Chair, he saved the department from dissolution by establishing courses for non-science majors that greatly increased the student/professor ratio.  In 1993, he took early retirement from UCLA and became a Research Professor in the Department of Astronomy at Boston University, receiving emeritus status in 2012.

In the field of space physics, George Siscoe was considered a father of space weather.  Using analogies with terrestrial weather, he encouraged the field to develop its applied side in response to the US government’s demand for relevancy in the 1980s.  Later, he encouraged cross-disciplinary research in physical processes universal to ionospheric, magnetospheric, heliospheric, and solar physics.  He helped establish summer school programs both at Boston University’s Center for Integrated Space Weather Modeling and for NASA’s still ongoing series on Heliophysics.

George Siscoe was a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and gave the first honorary Van Allen Lecture following the lecture by Van Allen, himself.  He served as Editor of the Journal of Geophysical Research and on many key panels and committees in the field.  He authored or co-authored over 300 papers and co-edited a monograph on space weather and three books on heliophysics stemming from the NASA summer schools.

In the summer of 2008, George Siscoe opened the Old Professor’s Bookshop in Belfast, Maine.  He used it as a platform to invite people to learn about the wonders of science and the breadth and depth of the humanities.  He curated unique collections of foundational books on most of the subjects one might find in any university catalog.  He offered monthly Shop Talks featuring invited speakers on a wide array of subjects, with meetings of the Belfast Athenaeum the preceding evening for social interactions with the speakers.  He established the Midcoast Exploration of Consciousness group, with monthly discussions, sometimes on cutting-edge research, which was of great interest to him.  In all these activities he strove to give people confidence in their own scholarly efforts.

George Siscoe is survived by his wife, Nancy Crooker, his daughter, Karen Siscoe of Los Angeles, his stepdaughter, Melora Lynngood of Victoria, British Columbia, his grandchildren, Kailey Fox and Christopher Levinger of Los Angeles, his step grandchildren, Athena and Demetrius Lynngood of Victoria, and his sister, Sandra McDole of Wildwood, Florida.

George Siscoe was a scholar and a gentleman who will be sorely missed.


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