James Burch, vice president of Southwest Research Institute's Space Science and Engineering Division, has received NASA's highest honor for non-government employees.
The award — NASA's Distinguished Public Service Medal — is given to citizens whose vision and service have helped advance NASA's mission throughout the country and supported its success.
Burch received this year's award based on his work leading investigations into the interaction of solar wind with Earth and Saturn's magnetospheres and comet environments. Burch has worked as a principal investigator for NASA on many research grants and missions, notably coming up with the concept for NASA's Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration spacecraft — the first medium-class explorer. He also invented new observing techniques for the spacecraft to observe the global structure of plasmas — important when studying how the weather in space affects life on earth.
Burch is the former chair of the National Research Council's Committee on Solar and Space Physics and has helmed more NASA studies than any other chair. He has been named a lifetime national associate of the National Academies and has been awarded the highest honor of the American Geophysical Union, the William Bowie Medal, in 2021.
San Antonio-based Southwest Research Institute is a nonprofit research and development organization. It operates as a contract R&D organization serving government and industry clients.
Barbara Giles, associate chief of the Geospace Physics Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said it's "difficult to find a science who has contributed more to NASA's Science Mission Directorate than James Birch."
