By David Sims, EOS

Berrien Moore III, University Distinguished Professor and Director of EOS, has been awarded the 2007 Dryden Lectureship in Research by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). The lecture, which Moore will deliver next January on the first evening of the AIAA annual meeting in Reno, Nevada, will be entitled “Challenges of a Changing Planet.”
 
Moore, a mathematician by training, has authored more than 150 papers on the carbon cycle, global biogeochemical cycles, and planetary change as well as numerous policy documents in the area of the global environment. In addition, he has chaired and served on numerous international scientific committees on global change issues. Currently he is co-chairing the National Academy of Sciences Decadal Survey in Earth Science, which charts the priorities for the next 10 to 15 years in Earth science from space. He serves on the Board of Directors of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, the Advisory Council of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the Science Advisory Board of the Max-Planck-Institut für Meteorologie in Hamburg Germany, among others. He has been the director of EOS since 1987. A full list of Moore’s professional affiliations and publications can be found at http://www.eos.sr.unh.edu/Faculty/Moore.
 
“I am honored to be chosen by the AIAA for the Dryden Lectureship since I hold past recipients in the highest regard. I am also challenged to discuss the future of Earth among many who will shape the science and technologies that are needed to understand our planet,” Moore said.
 
The AIAA is the scholarly and industrial society for the field of aerospace engineering. Founded in 1963, it merged two engineering societies – the American Interplanetary Society, later known as the American Rocket Society, which was founded in 1930, and the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences, founded in 1932. One of the institute’s primary responsibilities is “recognizing outstanding achievement” by conscientiously surveying the aerospace field to identify practitioners in its arts and sciences who have made notable and significant contributions.
 
Named for Hugh L. Dryden, one of NASA’s most visionary aeronautic engineers and deputy administrator of the space agency at the time of his death in 1976, the Dryden Lectureship in Research seeks to recognize “the importance of basic research to the advancement in aeronautics and astronautics.”
 
The first recipient of the lectureship was the pathbreaking astrophysict James Van Allen. Van Allen's instruments were aboard the first successful American satellites, Explorers 1 and 3, launched in 1958, and provided data for the first space-age scientific discovery: the existence of a doughnut-shaped region of charged particle radiation trapped by Earth's magnetic field now known as the Van Allen radiation belts.
 
Past Dryden lecturers include Edward Stone of the California Institute of Technology, project scientist for the Voyager Mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and former director of the JPL, and astronomer Gerard Kuiper who is considered to be the father of modern planetary science for his wide ranging studies of the solar system. It was Kuiper who, in 1951, proposed the existence of a disk-shaped region of minor planets outside the orbit of Neptune. This region, now known as the Kuiper belt, will be explored for the first time by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft that was launched Jan. 19 on a 10-year journey to the planet Pluto.
 
Moore’s selection for the Dryden Lectureship reflects not only the breadth and rigor of his science and contributions to the field, but also the increasing importance that society is placing on knowledge about our home planet – an area in which EOS and UNH excel.