DURHAM, N.H. (AP) - The University of New Hampshire is getting an expert on lightning.
Joseph Dwyer is joining the faculty in the fall. He’s coming from the Florida Institute of Technology, where he was department head and professor of physics and space sciences.
Dwyer’s primary research is focused on understanding the underlying physics of lightning discharges, which occur about four million times per day.
He and his colleagues have sent rockets tethered to the ground by a copper wire into thunderheads and succeeded in harnessing individual lightning strikes that produced intense bursts of X-ray radiation.
At UNH, he will work within the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and Space and the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences.
“He is generally credited with creating a new field of research on high-energy physics in lightning that originally grew out of observations made by orbiting gamma-ray observatories, including NASA’s Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, in which UNH played a key role,” says Mark McConnell, an astrophysicist in the Space Science Center and chair of the UNH physics department.
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