Russell Alan Hulse
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics
Former Vice President for Research and Economic Development at University of Texas at Dallas
Prof. Hulse is a distinguished American physicist. He earned a B.S. degree in physics in 1970 from the Cooper Union in Manhattan, and received his Ph.D. degree in physics in 1975 from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
While working on his Ph.D. dissertation, Hulse was a scholar at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico of Cornell University where he worked with his doctoral advisor, Joseph Hooton Taylor, on a large-scale survey for pulsars. In 1974, Hulse and Taylor discovered binary pulsar PSR B1913, which is made up of a pulsar and black companion star. Neutron star rotation emits impulses that are extremely regular and stable in the radio wave region and is nearby condensed material body gravitation . Hulse, Taylor, and other colleagues have used this first binary pulsar to make high-precision tests of general relativity, demonstrating the existence of gravitational waves, as propounded by Albert Einstein in his Theory of Relativity.
After receiving his Ph.D., Hulse did postdoctoral work at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia from 1975 to 1977. Hulse is a principal research physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory at Princeton University. In 2004, He began a concurrent relationship with University of Texas at Dallas as a visiting professor of physics and of science and mathematics education, and became the Founding Director of UT Dallas Science and Engineering Education Center (SEEC). He later assumed the additional role of associate vice president for research and economic development at UT Dallas.
Hulse and Taylor shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the first binary pulsar in 1993. Hulse was awarded Fellow of the American Physical Society, and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was cited in the American Men and Women of Science.