Leonard Culhane

Leonard John Celistus Culhane (otherwise known as J. Leonard Culhane) FRS (born 14 October 1937) is an Irish-born British astronomer, former director of the Mullard Space Science Laboratory at University College London.

Career He commenced his academic career as a lecturer at University College, London (1967–1976) with a short break as a researcher in Lockheed Palo Alto Laboratory, California in 1969, rising to be Reader in Physics from 1976 to 1981 and professor of physics from 1981 to 2006. During that time he was deputy director and then director of the Mullard Space Science Laboratory (1981–2003). On his retirement in 2006 he became emeritus professor of physics.

His interests lay in the fields of space instrumentation, solar physics, X-ray astronomy and EUV/X-ray spectroscopy.

Honors and awards 1970: elected member of the International Astronomical Union 1985: elected fellow, Royal Society of London 1991-1994: vice-president, European Space Agency Science Programme Committee 1991: elected full member of the International Academy of Astronautics 1993: awarded honorary doctorate of science, University of Wroclaw 1996: elected foreign member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters 2001: elected member Academia Europaea 2005: Royal Aeronautical Society, Specialist Silver Award and Geoffrey Pardoe Space Prize 2007: Awarded Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in astronomy 2008: Elected Fellow of University College London

Works J. Leonard Culhane, Peter W. Sanford, X-ray astronomy, Faber, 1981, J. Leonard Culhane, Eijirō Hiei (eds) Solar flare, coronal, and heliospheric dynamics, Pergamon, 1995 J. Leonard Culhane, Robert D. Bentley, John Gerard Doyle, R. Jeffrey Wilkes (eds), The sun and similar stars cosmic ray spectra and composition, Pergamon, 2001