Russell Hulse Physics’70
Russell Hulse PHY’70 is Regental Professor and Associate Vice President for Strategic Initiatives at the University of Texas at Dallas. Previously, he had a 30-year career at the Plasma Physics Laboratory at Princeton University. There, in a program operated by Princeton for the US Department of Energy, he created computer models for experiments associated with the quest to develop controlled thermonuclear fusion as an energy source.
Russell Hulse received his MS and PhD in Physics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. As a graduate student in 1974, he discovered the first binary pulsar, using the 1,000-foot radio telescope located near Arecibo, Puerto Rico. Data from the study of this pulsar system has provided the only experimental evidence confirming Einstein’s theory predicting the existence of gravitational waves. In 1993, along with his former thesis professor Joseph H. Taylor, Hulse was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics, for his discovery of the first “binary pulsar”-a celestial system in which two pulsars orbit each other.
Russell Hulse is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Physical Society.
Russell Hulse received the 1994 Gano Dunn Award and the 2003 President’s Citation Award. He was inducted into The Cooper Union Hall of Fame in 2009.
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