The Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) has selected Dr. David J. McComas, assistant vice president of the Space Science and Engineering Division at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), to receive a 2014 COSPAR Space Science Award during the inaugural ceremony of the 40th COSPAR Scientific Assembly, August 4, in Moscow. The award recognizes outstanding contributions to space science.
“I am incredibly honored and humbled to be receiving COSPAR’s Space Science Award,” McComas said. “It’s really a tribute not to me, but to all of the great people that I have been privileged to work with here at SwRI and, before that, at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and all of my many other excellent colleagues and collaborators from around the world.”
Since joining SwRI in 2000, McComas has helped lead SwRI’s overall space science and engineering program. He is principal investigator of NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) and Two Wide-angle Imaging Neutral-atom Spectrometers (TWINS) missions. He also is principal investigator for space science instruments on numerous other NASA missions, including two instruments for the Solar Probe Plus mission, scheduled to launch in 2018.
McComas is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is also a member of the NASA Advisory Council (NAC), for which he chairs the NAC Science Committee.
McComas holds six patents and has authored more than 500 refereed scientific papers that have been cited approximately 18,000 times, spanning a range of research topics including coronal, solar wind, heliospheric, magnetospheric, cometary, planetary and interstellar science, as well as numerous space flight instruments and techniques.
COSPAR was established in 1958, just at the start of the space age, by what is now the International Council for Science. Worldwide membership in COSPAR has grown to include 43 member nations involved in space research. Over the past three decades there have been 25 prior recipients of COSPAR’s Space Science Award worldwide, starting with its first recipient — James A. Van Allen in 1984.
