Columbia Accident Investigation Board Chairman Names New Members

Columbia Accident Investigation Board Chairman Names New Members Columbia Accident Investigation Board Chairman Adm. Hal Gehman has asked National Aeronautics and Space Administration Administrator Sean O’Keefe to appoint three new members to the CAIB. Those members are: Nobel Prize laureate in Physics Dr. Douglas Osheroff; former NASA astronaut and physicist Dr. Sally Ride; and George Washington University Space Policy Institute Director Dr. John Logsdon.

• Dr. Douglas D. Osheroff was awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics. He shares the prize with two colleagues from Cornell University for their discovery of superfluidity in helium-3. Dr. Osheroff received his BS from California Tech and Ph.D. from Cornell. He is the G. Jackson and C.J. Wood Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Stanford University. Dr. Osheroff was a member of the technical staff at the Department of Solid State and Low Temperature Research at Bell Laboratories in the 1970s. As a graduate student at Cornell before that, Osheroff and his thesis advisors, David M. Lee and Robert C. Richardson, discovered the first of three superfluid phases of liquid helium-3, at a temperature only about two-thousandths of a degree above absolute zero. Osheroff is a leader in the study of superfluidity and of the properties of thin superconducting films. He served as Chairman of the Physics Department from 1993 until August 1996. The Nobel Prize caps a long list of awards Osheroff has received. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, he has won the Simon Memorial Prize, the Oliver Buckley Prize, and was named a MacArthur Fellow. Osheroff also won a Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching.