Wholehearted Engagement Holder of seven degrees. Engineer. An instrument and multi-engine rated airplane and helicopter pilot. Skydiver. Airplane mechanic. FAA-certified flight instructor. Star gazer. Administrator. It’s a wonder where Gordon Emslie finds the time. And, yet, the graduate college’s dean added another notch to his résumé last June. OSU named Emslie Regents Professor four years after he came to campus from the University of Alabama-Huntsville’s physics department, where he spent 23 years as the university’s first Wernher von Braun Fellow. His fascination with astrophysics, especially using math to understand things we could never see, began when he was a child growing up outside the Scottish shipbuilding metropolis of Glasgow. When Emslie was a child, his grandfather gave him a copy of astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle’s textbook, Frontiers of Astronomy. “It’s not a book you typically give a seven year old,” he says. “To this day I’m amazed that we actually know what the inside of a star looks like, but we really do.” In 1972, he began studying physics and astronomy at the University of Glasgow and worked in the steelworks during the summer. One year, his adviser saved him from another round of shoveling shale by inviting him to study at Harvard, where he conducted research. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1976 and a doctoral degree in 1979, both from the University of Glasgow. He joined UAHuntsville in 1981. An expert in solar flare theory, Emslie’s research took off soon afterward with a satellite team from the University of California Berkeley and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center outside Washington, D.C. The work culminated in the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager, a satellite launched in 2002 to study, among other things, particle acceleration and energy release in flares, the bursts of energy that explode across the sun’s surface and release the equivalent radiation of millions of 100-megaton hydrogen bombs. “We’ve used the satellite to study how particles are accelerated in general, whether it’s black holes in galaxies or whatever,” says Emslie, who rose to dean of UAHuntsville’s graduate school. “The sun is our closest laboratory to do this — eight light minutes away. The closest star is four light years away.” In Huntsville, he picked up flying and skydiving, completing 3,000 jumps and a 246-person formation that set a skydiving world record in 1999. He worked weekends for a Georgia airfreight company where he learned to fly a DC-3, a World War II-era cargo plane, and became an airplane mechanic. “If anyone wants to fly a DC-3 for an hour, he first has to spend two to get it running,” he says. One day, Emslie took a call from someone with OSU asking him if he’d be interested in its graduate college dean position. He interviewed in 2004 and fell in love with the campus. “Joe St. John (a former Student Government Association president) and his buddies were playing cricket on the library lawn, and it’s February, for God’s sake. And, I thought, ‘Okay, I’ve got to go to this place. This is a real campus. It has a football team, people with orange on all the time. They love it here, and I’m going to be a part of a real university.’ I was fortunate they offered me the job.” He teaches astrophysics at OSU, as well as engineering certification courses, and has taught an honors seminar. Fellow physics professors Jim Wicksted and Steve McKeever nominated him for a Regents Professorship. “I’m honored to be selected and hope I can live up to it,” he says. That shouldn’t be a problem. Emslie, who also teaches flying at the OSU Flight Center at the Stillwater Regional Airport, throws himself into whatever task he fancies, whether it’s studying particle physics or hurling himself out of airplanes. Matt Elliott Photo by Phil Shockley Regents Professor Oklahoma State university 21 faculty News
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