Physicist and University Professor Russell J. Donnelly recently added another honor to his lengthy list of accomplishments with his appointment to the editorial board of the mathematics and physical sciences division of the Royal Society of London.
Donnelly is also a member of the National Science Foundation, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and has served on the editorial board of the Physical Review, a prestigious physics publication. In 1997, he received a $5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to create a prototype liquid helium flask to study turbulence and convection, an idea he told New Scientist he thought of while biking along the Willamette River in 1988.
“There is little doubt that my ideas for cryogenic helium are going to be very important both for fundamental research on turbulence and for testing,” he told Cold Facts, the publication for the Cryogenic Society of America.
The seasoned physicist has been working in the field for more than 50 years. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1956 and worked at the University of Chicago as an instructor and professor of physics until 1965. In 1966 he came to the University and served as chairman of the physics department until 1972, and again from 1982 to 1983.
Last year, Donnelly won the Fritz London Memorial Prize, the highest honor in the world in the field of low-temperature physics.
His position with the Royal Society of London requires him to support the society’s publication by
submitting his own papers, giving advice and encouraging others in his field to submit papers.
“I am looking forward to going to London a couple times a year,” he said.
Donnelly also appreciates music and was in the audience at the first Oregon Bach Festival.
“I’ve been active in the Bach Festival since the beginning,” he said.
Another one of his “side projects” is a television project based on the book “Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold,” by Tom Shachtman. The series is slated to appear on PBS, and Donnelly will be working with Emmy-award winning producer David Dugan.
“It’s literally cool,” he said about the book, which examines the nature and history of the concept of cold.
Donnelly received a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to work on the series but has to supply matching funds.
“I think an important way of sharing it is bringing it to the public without all the equations,” he said about the series. “If you know of another two million bucks I can get a hold of, let me know.”