PITTSBURGH, PA, July 05, 2018 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Marquis Who's Who, the world's premier publisher of biographical profiles, is proud to present Peter Denis Usher, Ph.D., with the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. An accomplished listee, Dr. Usher celebrates many years' experience in his professional network, and has been noted for achievements, leadership qualities, and the credentials and successes he has accrued in his field. As in all Marquis Who's Who biographical volumes, individuals profiled are selected on the basis of current reference value. Factors such as position, noteworthy accomplishments, visibility, and prominence in a field are all taken into account during the selection process.
Dr. Usher is an Emeritus Professor at Pennsylvania State University. Prior to retiring in 1999, he held the rank of Professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University from 1987, as an Associate Professor from 1973, and Assistant Professor from 1968. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics under Professor Charles A. Whitney from 1966 to 1967, and a research scientist for American Science and Engineering, Inc., from 1967 to 1968.
Before coming to America, Dr. Usher attended the University of the Free State, South Africa, earning a Master of Science in Applied Mathematics in 1959. That year, he was awarded a Frank Knox Fellowship to Harvard University and in 1965 he graduated with a Doctor of Philosophy in Astronomy. His doctoral thesis contained a unique derivation and independent discovery of the regularized Poincare-Lighthill coordinate stretching expansion. He has written over 100 articles for the Astrophysical Journal, the Astronomical Journal, the Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, the International Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nature, Mercury Magazine, and others. He is a member of the International Astronomical Union, the Royal Astronomical Society, the American Astronomical Society, and the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship.
At the suggestion of Dr. Allan Sandage, he commenced a study of faint blue objects using the Palomar 48-inch Schmidt telescope. This led to the US Survey of Ultraviolet-excess Star-like objects whose selection effects he and his coworkers quantified fully and which gave the catalog its name. The catalogue produced medium-bright quasar surface densities that were among the world's best in 1984 and 2000. Using it, a Penn State undergraduate discovered a Cataclysmic Variable star now named DV UMa, and four graduate students identified the approximately 200th-brightest quasar using the Penn State 62-inch telescope.
From 1982 to 1989, Dr. Usher edited the Astronomy Quarterly, and has additionally contributed to Pennsylvania State University as an assistant to the Director of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in the Humanities. In 1996, he posited that William Shakespeare's Hamlet was an allegory for three cosmological models extant during the bard's lifetime. He presented this and other new interpretations of some of Shakespeare's plays in peer-reviewed journals and three books: Hamlet's Universe (2006/7), Shakespeare and the Dawn of Modern Science (2010), and Shakespeare and Saturn: Accounting for Appearances (2015). Telescopic astronomical observations occurred for the first time in 1609, but Dr. Usher has concluded that decades prior to that, Shakespeare knew of celestial data that were only accessible telescopically.
Dr. Usher was selected for inclusion in the second edition of Who's Who in Science and Engineering, and in recognition of outstanding contributions to his profession and the Marquis Who's Who community, Dr. Usher has been featured on the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement website. Please visit www.ltachievers.com for more information about this honor.
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