Pullin Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

6 December 2006—Jorge Pullin, adjunct professor of physics at Penn State and the Horace Hearne Professor of Physics at Louisiana State University, has been elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society. The honor is given to members whose "efforts on behalf of the advancement of science or its applications are scientifically or socially distinguished.” The award will be presented to 449 individuals during the 2007 AAAS Annual Meeting in San Francisco, California.

Pullin's research focuses on both classical and quantum-mechanical aspects of gravitational physics. He has developed equations to compute the gravitational waveforms and radiated energies generated by the collision of two black holes. These calculations are currently of great interest in astrophysics because the new Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is expected to detect several black-hole collisions per year, and the calculations provide a theoretical basis for interpretation of the data.

Pullin and Abhay Ashtekar, Eberly Professor of Physics and director of the Institute for Gravitational Physics and Geometry at Penn State, jointly run a weekly “International Quantum Gravity Seminar” from Penn State in which 15 research groups from North America, South America, and Europe participate via telephone and the World Wide Web. This series is widely regarded as providing intellectual focus to the field worldwide. Pullin says, "Regular conversations with Abhay Ashtekar continue to deeply influencing my thoughts about research directions today, just as when we were both physically at the University Park campus."

Pullin joined the Penn State faculty in 1993 as an assistant professor. He was named associate professor in 1997 and professor in July 2000. In 2001, he joined the faculty of Louisiana State University, named to the Horace C Hearne Jr. Chair in Theoretical Physics, retaining his association with Penn State as an adjunct faculty member. He also has been an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Utah since 2000. Prior to coming to Penn State, Pullin was a research associate at the University of Utah from 1991 to 1993 and at Syracuse University from 1990 to 1991.

Pullin was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2002. He was honored with a Fulbright Fellowship and the Edward A. Bouchet Award from the American Physical Society in 2001, and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998. In 1995, he received a research fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and a Faculty Early Career Development Award (CAREER) from the National Science Foundation. He also received the Jack W. Keuffel Award for Outstanding Research in Physics at the University of Utah in 1992. He is a life member of the American Physical Society and of the International Society of General Relativity and Gravitation. He also is a corresponding member of the National Academy of Sciences of Argentina, the National Academy of Sciences of Mexico, and the Latin American Academy of Sciences.

Since 2003, Pullin has been a member of scientific advisory boards at the Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of California in Santa Barbara, the NASA Center for Gravitational Wave Astronomy in Texas, and of the Perimeter Institute in Canada. He was named a fellow and charter physicist of the Institute of Physics in the United Kingdom in 1999, and was elected to the executive board of the LIGO Research Community in 1999.

Pullin has published more than 100 scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals and has published one book, titled “Loops, Knots, Gauge Theories, and Quantum Gravity“ (Cambridge University Press, 1996). He has written many review articles for the American Mathematical Society’s Mathematical Review, and has written several invited reviews for SIAM Journal of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Physics Today, and Physics World. He has been the managing editor of the International Journal of Modern Physics-D since 2005, and has been on the editorial board of the New Journal of Physics since 2001. He also was on the editorial board of Living Reviews in Relativity in 2004.

Pullin received master's and doctoral degrees in physics from the Instituto Balseiro in Argentina in 1986 and 1988, respectively. He also studied electronic engineering at the University of Buenos Aires from 1981 to 1983.

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