UpDate - Vol. 13, No. 17, Page 1
February 3, 1994
Bartol researcher is U.D.'s 10th NYI award recipient

     Gary Zank, assistant professor in the Bartol Research Institute, has
received a National Young Investigator (NYI) award from the National
Science Foundation. Zank is the 10th U.D. researcher to earn this
distinction.
     This awards program, formerly called Presidential Young Investigators
Program, was established in 1984 to help universities attract and retain
outstanding young researchers who might otherwise pursue non-academic
careers. The award is for $25,000 per year and can be extended to five
years, with up to an additional $37,500 each year if matching funds from
eligible sources are forthcoming, thus providing up to a half million
dollars over five years.
     In the past, eight Presidential Young Investigator awards were given
to Mark A. Barteau, Prasad S. Dhurjati, Henry C. Foley, Eric W. Kaler,
Michael T. Klein, Abraham M. Lenhoff, Michael E. Paulaitis and Norman J.
Wagner in the University's Department of Chemical Engineering, and to Klaus
Theopold in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.
     According to Norman Ness, Bartol president and professor, the NYI
award is highly competitive and one of the most prestigious awards given to
young researchers.
     "The NYI award acknowledges the cutting edge of Zank's research and
contributions to astrophysics and will enable him to extend his work," Ness
said.
     Zank describes his general field of interest as space plasma physics,
which is concerned with plasma phenomena within the planetary system. To a
lesser degree, he is interested in plasma astrophysics, which studies
problems beyond the solar system. Plasma, which is the fourth state of
matter-the other three being solid, liquid and gas-makes up 99 percent of
the universe and is a collection of charged particles, containing about
equal numbers of ions and electrons.
     Zank said he is interested in the theory of turbulence in space, shock
waves and the solar wind.
     "My research is generally data driven," he said. "Information is
collected from a variety of sources, such as telescopes, spacecraft and
neutron monitors, for example. My goal is to describe the origin of this
data mathematically, and to predict what will occur when specific events in
space take place.
     "For example," he said, "when an explosion occurs on the surface of
the sun, it drives matter into space, an effect similar to a gun shooting a
bullet, creating shock waves and accelerating energetic particles. The mass
ejections are monitored and data are collected. One aspect of my research
is to understand how energetic particles are energized at the shock and how
the shock propagates.
     "In one instance, a telescope happened to be trained on a star as it
began to explode. It was possible to make measurements of the explosion
from the beginning of the star's disintegration, allowing a study of how
cosmic rays moving at the speed of light are accelerated, how shock waves,
associated with super nova, might form, as well as other questions."
     Zank is also interested in the solar wind and its interaction with
planets, comets and the interstellar medium. The effect is similar to the
crest created by the bow of a boat cutting through a river. Sometimes, the
shocks emit waves of low frequency. Some of these have been detected from
the solar wind termination shock where the wind ends and interacts with
interstellar medium by the spacecraft Voyager, an event recently reported
upon at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Baltimore last May and
also in The New York Times, Zank said.
     In August, Zank was invited to present a paper on a theory about these
radio emissions at the International Association of Geomagnetism and
Aeronomy conference in Buenos Aires.
     An applied mathematician by training, with undergraduate and doctoral
degrees from the University of Natal in Durban, South Africa, Zank was a
Max-Planck Fellow at the Max-Planck Institutes in Heidelberg and Lindau for
two-and-a-half years. He came to the University of Delaware in 1989 as a
Bartol post-doctoral fellow and became an assistant professor in 1991.
     He has edited a book with Thomas K. Gaisser, Bartol professor,
entitled Particle Acceleration in Cosmic Plasmas, the proceedings of a
conference they organized at the University of Delaware in 1991. Zank also
serves as associate editor of the Journal of Plasma Physics, published by
the Cambridge University Press. He has published more than 42 articles in
referred journals.
                                                  -Sue Swyers Moncure