AUSTIN, Texas—Dr. Frank Shu, a renowned astrophysicist, will give a public lecture on “The Origin of Sunlike Stars and Planetary Systems” from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m., Wednesday, Feb. 5, in the Engineering Teaching Center (ETC) 2.108 at The University of Texas at Austin.
Shu, president and professor of physics at the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, is visiting the university’s Department of Astronomy as the 2002-03 Antoinette de Vaucouleurs Memorial Lecturer.
Shu is known for pioneering theoretical work in a diverse set of fields, including the origin of meteorites, the birth and early evolution of stars and the structure of spiral galaxies. Most notably, a seminal paper in 1977 described the collapse of a dense interstellar cloud to form a star. This work on what is now widely known as “the standard model” provides the underpinning for studies of the formation of stars and planetary systems. With students and colleagues, Shu has performed fundamental calculations on the structure of planet-forming disks around very young stars, the jets and winds that these stars and their disks generate, and the production of chondrules, carbonaceous inclusions in meteorites.
Shu, who was educated at MIT and Harvard, held faculty appointments at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and University of California at Berkeley before becoming president of the National Tsing Hua University in 2002. He also is a University Professor Emeritus at Berkeley. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences in this country and the Academia Sinica in Taiwan.
For more information contact: Elizabeth Donihoo, 512-471-7304.
