Dr. Gordon Shepherd

Biography

Gordon G. Shepherd, born in Saskatchewan, obtained BSc and MSc degrees from the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon and his PhD at the University of Toronto in 1956. He served as Assistant and Associate Professor in Physics at the University of Saskatchewan from 1957 to 1969, where he conducted ground-based rocket studies of auroras. In 1969, Dr. Shepherd became a Professor of Physics at York University in Toronto and served as Principal Investigator for the Red Line Photometer on the ISIS-II spacecraft, launched in 1971. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Canadian Aeronautics and Space Institute. Between 1991 and 1993, he was awarded the Killam Fellowship. In 1999, Dr. Shepherd was elected a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, and in 2003, he received the John H. Chapman Award for Excellence from the Canadian Space Agency. He was also honored with the SCOSTEP Distinguished Research Scientist Award and the COSPAR William Nordberg Medal. Over the course of his career, he has supervised thirty MSc and thirty PhD students to completion and participated in the satellite mission WINDII (Wind Imaging Interferometer) aboard NASA’s Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, launched in 1991 and operational until 2003, which resulted in numerous scientific publications, with recent works published in 2021 on unique descriptions of winds in the upper atmosphere.

Research Interests

Experience