Gerrit Verschuur

Gerrit L. Verschuur (born in 1937 in Cape Town, South Africa) is an American scientist who is best known for his work in radio astronomy. Though a pioneer in that field, Verschuur is also an author (he has written about astronomy, natural disasters, and earth sciences), inventor, adjunct professor of physics for the University of Memphis, and Astronomer Emeritus - Arecibo Observatory and now semi-retired. He served for a time as the Chief Scientist for Translucent Technologies, LLC; a company which is based in Memphis, Tennessee.

In 1992 Verschuur became a resident of the City of Lakeland, which is located in Shelby County, Tennessee, northwest of Memphis. In 2001 Verschuur was elected, and served a four-year term as commissioner. In 2007 he was elected again and served for a total of 10 years. In Lakeland, Verschuur was also the President of the [http://www.garnerlake.com/glainformation.html Garner Lake Association]. Since 1986 he has been married to Dr. Joan Schmelz, a fellow scientist whose specialty is solar astronomy, specifically coronal loops. Verschuur has one son who lives in England.

During his years living beside the lake in Lakeland he made a fundamental discovery concerning the manner in which light interacts with a so-called Secchi Disk that is used to measure the transparency of lake and ocean waters. The disk had been invented in the mid-nineteenth century by a Jesuit priest (Angela Secchi) but no one before Verschuur had understand the optics underlying the measurement technique.

Verschuur has taught at the University of Manchester, Rhodes University, the universities of Colorado and Maryland, UCLA, and the University of California, Berkeley, among others. He has been an annual speaker at [https://web.archive.org/web/20071009062531/http://www.rainwaterobservatory.org/stargaze/ Mid-South Stargaze], "the annual amateur astronomers conference and star party held at Rainwater Observatory in French Camp, Mississippi." In 1971 Verschuur was hired as the first Director of Fiske Planetarium for the University of Colorado at Boulder, and in 1980 he worked with Dr. John C. Lilly.

In his primary field of study Verschuur "pioneered the measurement of the interstellar magnetic field using the 21-cm Zeeman effect technique." A thing which, according to Virginia Trimble, for the first time allowed astronomers to "measure magnetic strengths and their place-to-place variations with some confidence." Provided by Wikipedia