F. Curtis Michel Academic Papers

F. Curtis Michel was born in La Crosse, Wisconsin on June 5, 1934. He attended college at the California Institute of Technology, where he received both a Bachelor of Science degree (with honors) in Physics in 1955 and a Doctorate in Physics in 1962. Dr. Michel was employed at the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company’s Guided Missile Division before joining the U.S. Air Force in 1955. He served in the military for three years and then became a research fellow at the California Institute of Technology.

Dr. Michel came to Houston in 1963 to become a professor at Rice University, and he was one of the first faculty members of the Space Science Department there. In June of 1965, he was selected by NASA to become a scientist-astronaut, and took 4 years of leave from Rice to fulfill this position. He then returned to Rice in 1969 and served for five years as the Department Chairman (1974-1979). He was named the Andrew Hays Buchanan Professor of Astrophysics at Rice in 1974, a Guggenheim Fellow to the University of Paris, France, from 1979-1980, and a Humboldt fellow to Heidelberg, Germany from 1982-1983. Dr. Michel has also written a book called Theory of Neutron Star Magnetospheres. He is also a member of the American Geophysical Union, the American Astronomical Society, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society.