Out-of-this-world award
Reiff honored for spreading space science education

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

Patricia Reiff, a Rice professor of physics and astronomy and director of the Rice Space Institute, has earned the 2009 Athelstan Spilhaus Award for Enhancement of the Public Understanding of Earth and Space Science.

	PATRICIA REIFF

The award, which honors those who devote portions of their lives to expressing the excitement, significance and beauty of the Earth and space sciences to the public, was presented recently at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Joint Assembly in Toronto.

While Reiff’s areas of research have encompassed space-plasma physics, including studies of the aurora borealis and the magnetosphere, she has also spent a great deal of time working in close cooperation with NASA and the Houston Museum of Natural Science (HMNS) to encourage education and public outreach. She also created a new degree program at Rice, the Master of Science Teaching degree, to give teachers more content in earth and space science.

More than a million people have interacted with her exhibits and seen the planetarium shows she’s produced at the museum, including the current production, “Impact Earth.”

Reiff has also worked with the HMNS to create Discovery Domes, portable digital planetariums to teach earth and space sciences to people in remote areas. To date, more than 85 domes have been placed in 22 countries.

AGU officials said Reiff personified the ideals honored by the award: “That science should be fun, that science is exciting and that science is significant in our society.”

Reiff, who is in China this week leading a solar-eclipse tour, said in her acceptance that she was a child of the Space Age who became hooked on space science when she and her dad took a father/daughter astronomy course at the Oklahoma City Planetarium. “Astronauts were our heroes, and President John F. Kennedy’s speech at Rice in 1962 inspired many of us,” she wrote.

The late Spilhaus was a geophysicist and oceanographer who developed the bathythermograph, a tool that made possible the measurement of ocean depths and temperatures. He also authored a Sunday comics feature, “Our New Age,” that taught about science and ran in newspapers from 1957 to ’73.