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ONEONTA, N.Y. -- Associate Professor
Hugh Gallagher, Jr., of the SUNY College at Oneonta
Physics and Astronomy
Department has been awarded a three-year grant of $100,007 as principal
investigator for a project entitled "Collaborative Research: RUI--Intermediate
Scale Structures in the Auroral Oval and the Ionospheric Trough." Dr.
Gallagher's project, which will involve SUNY-Oneonta students as well as
faculty colleagues at Siena College and the University of Texas at Austin,
will examine the causes of space weather processes that impact technologies
on and near Earth.
Dr. Gallagher will use the grant to establish a series of nine Coherent
Ionospheric Doppler Receiver systems in the Northeast, five of which are
already in operation. He and his students will use the receivers to gather
data on the space weather processes and place it in a database that will be
made available to scientists nationwide. Because irregularities in the
ionosphere impact radio communications, navigation systems, and radar
signals, the data will have potential applications in the airline industry
as well as in scientific research.
Hugh Gallagher, who joined the SUNY-Oneonta faculty in 2000, holds a
doctorate in physics from Boston College, where, as a graduate student and
NASA Fellow, he took part in several research expeditions to Greenland to
study the aurora. He taught previously at Bloomsburg University of
Pennsylvania, Boston College, and Johns Hopkins University.
Dr. Gallagher received the 2001 Richard Siegfried Junior Faculty Prize
for Academic Excellence from the College at Oneonta. He was an invited
speaker at the 1998 NASA Workshop on the New Millennium Magnetosphere, where
he discussed the determination of global electric currents in the near-earth
regions of space.
Dr. Gallagher is also the principal investigator for the five-year grant
from the National Science Foundation that funded the College's
PR2EPS program, which
focuses on Preparation, Recruitment, Retention and Excellence in the
Physical Sciences. He serves as Director of the College's
Science Discovery Center.
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