Faculty of Science

Dale Frail has been awarded a prestigious Fellowship from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The Guggenheim Foundation describes its fellowships as "mid-career" awards"for men and women who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts."

 

Dale has been a scientist at the NRAO for more than 20 years, first as a postdoctoral fellow, and then as a staff scientist. He received his bachelor's degree in physics from Acadia University in Nova Scotia, and his Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Toronto.

 

Dale is best known for his landmark contributions to the understanding of gamma ray bursts, making critical measurements that provided key insights into the mechanisms of these superenergetic and once-mysterious explosions.

 

He also has made important contributions to the understanding of other astronomical phenomena, including pulsars and their neighborhoods,supernova remnants, and magnetars. In 1992, he was the co-discoverer, with Alex Wolszczan, of the first planets outside our own solar system.

 

Chosen from some 3,000 applicants, Dale is one of 180 recipients of this year's Guggenheim Fellowships. The fellowships were established in 1925 and past recipients include photographer Ansel Adams, author Saul Bellow, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and chemist Linus Pauling. More than a hundred Guggenheim Fellows have subsequently won Nobel Prizes, and others have received Pulitzer Prizes and other honors.

 

As a Guggenheim Fellow, Dale intends to intensify his research on pulsars, cosmology, and gamma ray bursts, using the Expanded Very Large Array to advance the frontiers of knowledge.