Jeff Cuzzi

Jeff Cuzzi

Jeff Cuzzi received his Ph.D. from Caltech, and worked in radio interferometry for several years, which led him to study Saturn's rings as well as to a brief stab at Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence using radio astronomy. He led the rings subgroup of the Voyager Imaging Team through planning of all Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune encounter ring observations. He was selected in 1990 as Interdisciplinary Scientist for Planetary Rings on the NASA-ESA Cassini-Huygens mission. For his research in planetary rings, he received the Lawrence Sperry Award of the AIAA, and has been awarded NASA's Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement twice. Since 1986 Jeff has devoted a second research thrust to exploring the physics of planetary formation in the era when particle and gas phases are strongly coupled, using numerical fluid dynamics techniques, and is relating these results to the properties of primitive meteorites. Jeff served as Chief of the Planetary Systems Branch of Ames' Space Science Division for four years during 1993-1996.