Frank Press
| Frank Press | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
December 4, 1924 Brooklyn, New York, United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Geophysics |
| Alma mater |
City College of New York (B.S.) (1944) Columbia University (M.S.) (1946) Columbia University (Ph.D)(1949) |
| Doctoral advisor | Maurice "Doc" Ewing |
| Doctoral students | Don L. Anderson, Charles Archambeau |
| Notable awards |
William Bowie Medal (1979) Japan Prize (1993) Vannevar Bush Award (1994) Lomonosov Gold Medal (1997) |
| Notes | |
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photo: Jerusalem, 1953
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Frank Press (born December 4, 1924) is an American geophysicist. An advisor to four U.S. Presidents, he later served two consecutive terms as President of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (1981-1993). He is the author of 160 scientific papers and co-author of the textbooks Earth and Understanding Earth.
Press served on President's Science Advisory Committee during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations and was appointed by President Nixon to the National Science Board. In 1977 he was appointed President Jimmy Carter's science advisor and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, serving until 1981.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Press graduated with a B.S. degree from the City College of New York (1944) and completed his M.A. (1946) and Ph.D. (1949) degrees at Columbia University under Maurice "Doc" Ewing. As one of Ewing's two assistant professors, (with J. Lamar "Joe" Worzel as the other) Press was a co-founder of Lamont Geological Observatory (now Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory) in Palisades, N.Y. Originally trained as an oceanographer, Press participated in research cruises on the sailing vessels RV Vema and RV Atlantis.
In the early 1950s, Press turned to seismology, co-authoring with Ewing and Jardetzky a seminal monograph on elastic waves in layered media. In 1957, Press was recruited by Caltech to succeed founder Beno Gutenberg as director of the Seismological Laboratory, a position in which he remained until 1965. The appointment was controversial in that it passed over both Hugo Benioff and Charles Richter, then the laboratory's senior professors, for a much younger outsider.
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