Juan G. Roederer is a professor of physics emeritus at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF). His research fields are space physics, psychoacoustics, science policy and information theory. He conducted pioneering research on solar cosmic rays, on the theory of earth's radiation belts, neural networks for pitch processing, and currently on the foundations of information theory. He is also an accomplished organist.

Career

Roederer was born in Trieste, Italy, on September 2, 1929. He lived as a child in Vienna, Austria, where he went to primary school. In 1939 his family emigrated to Argentina where he completed his education. In high school he met physicist Beatriz Cougnet who would become his wife and research partner. Roederer earned a Ph.D. in physical-mathematical sciences at University of Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1952 where he studied with Estrella Mazzoli de Mathov. From 1953 to 1955 he worked as guest research scientist at Werner Heisenberg's Max Planck Institute for Physics in Göttingen, Germany. From 1959 to 1966 he was professor of physics at the University of Buenos Aires. In 1967 he moved to the United States where he became professor of physics at the University of Denver, Colorado. In 1977 he was appointed director of the Geophysical Institute at UAF, a post he held until 1986; during that time he also served four years as dean of the College of Environmental Sciences. From 1987 until 2014 he taught and conducted research at the University of Alaska, which conferred him emeritus status in 1993. A visiting staff member of the Los Alamos National Laboratory since 1978, he was chairman of its advisory committee on Earth and Space Sciences from 1983 to 1988. From 1986 to 1992 he served two United States presidents as chairman of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission. Between 1997 and 2003 he was senior adviser to the director of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy. He now lives in Boulder, Colorado, where one of his activities is writing politically oriented letters to the local newspaper The Daily Camera. He served as member and chairman of several United States Academy of Sciences/National Research Council committees, and was president of the International Association of Geomagnetism and Aeronomy and of the ICSU Committee on Solar Terrestrial Physics

Publications

Roederer is author of 250 articles in scientific journals. He is author and editor of various books

Awards and honors