Neil Sheeley

Dr. Neil R. Sheeley, Jr. obtained his advanced degrees in physics at Caltech (BS 1960 and PhD 1965). His PhD thesis, “Observations of Solar Magnetic Fields”, was based on observations he made at the Mt. Wilson Observatory.  In 1965, he joined the Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) and continued ground-based solar research during1965-1972.  In 1973, he joined NRL and moved to Houston, TX to participate in the operations phase of Skylab’s Apollo Telescope Mount (ATM) experiment.  In 1974, he returned to Tucson to compare NRL’s Skylab observations with supporting observations from Kitt Peak.  In 1977, he moved to the DC area and spent the next 39 years analyzing NRL’s  space-based solar observations and performing numerical simulations of solar magnetic fields.  He served most of that time as the Solar-Terrestrial Theory Section Head, and, in addition, was the Scientific Officer for ONR’s Contract Research Program in Solar Physics during 1986-1990.  He received NRL’s E.O. Hulburt Award in 2004, the AAS/Solar Physics Division’s Hale Prize in 2009, and was elected an Inaugural Fellow of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in 2020.  He retired from NRL on November 30, 2016, and currently serves as a Visiting Research Scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory of the University of Arizona.