Bloomberg.com

Purdue University names astrophysicist France Cordova president

May 8, 2007

May 8 (Bloomberg) -- Purdue University named astrophysicist and former NASA chief scientist France A. Cordova as the institution's 11th president.

Cordova, 59, is the current chancellor of the University of California, Riverside, a position she's held since 2002, Purdue officials said in a statement yesterday. She replaces Martin C. Jischke, who will retire on June 30, after serving as president since Aug. 14, 2000.

The appointment comes at a time when the West Lafayette, Indiana, university is broadening its academic programs and fundraising to support research in areas such as biomedical engineering and nanotechnology.

Cordova, who once worked on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Hubble Space Telescope, has specialized in observational and experimental astrophysics, research on X-ray and gamma ray sources, and space-borne instrumentation.

After earning a doctorate in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1979, Cordova spent 10 years at the U.S. government's Los Alamos National Laboratory as a member of the Space Astronomy and Astrophysics Group. She then moved to Penn State University, where she led the astronomy and astrophysics department.

Cordova joined the U.S. space agency in 1993, serving as the primary scientific adviser to the NASA administrator and liaison to the broader scientific community. She also served on the National Science and Technology Council's Fundamental Science Committee. She is the winner of NASA's highest honor, the Distinguished Service Medal.