Frank Shu
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Frank Shu (born in Kunming, China), is an astrophysicist, author and professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley and the university president of the National Tsing Hua University.
He achieved his BS in physics in 1963 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his PhD in astronomy in 1968 at Harvard University.
Shu is known for pioneering theoretical work in a diverse set of fields, including the origin of meteorites, the birth and early evolution of stars and the structure of spiral galaxies. Most notably, a seminal paper in 1977 described the collapse of a dense interstellar cloud to form a star. This work on what is now widely known as the standard model of collapsing, provides the underpinning for studies of the formation of stars and planetary systems. Shu has also performed calculations on the structure of planet-forming disks around very young stars, the jets and winds that these stars and their disks generate, and the production of chondrules, carbonaceous inclusions in meteorites.
He served as chair of the astronomy department of Harvard from 1984 until 1988, and held faculty appointments at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and University of California at Berkeley before becoming president of the National Tsing Hua University in 2002. He also is a university professor emeritus at Berkeley. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences in the U.S. and the Academia Sinica in Taiwan.
He is the author of several books, among them Physical Universe: An Introduction to Astronomy (University Science Books, 1982) which has become one of the standard textbooks for undergraduate astrophysics courses all over the world.
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