Space physicist Mihály Horányi honored as 2025 professor of distinction
College of Arts and Sciences leadership and peers recognize the physics professor service, teaching and research with the award
Mihály Horányi, a ϾƷ professor of physics, has been named the2025 College Professor of Distinctionby the College of Arts and Sciencesin recognition of his exceptional service, teaching and research.
Mihály Horányi, a ϾƷ professor of physics, has been named the 2025 College Professor of Distinction by the College of Arts and Sciences.
The college presents this prestigious award annually to current faculty members who are scholars and artists of national and international renown and who are recognized by their college peers asteachers and colleagues of exceptional talent.
“I’m truly surprised and honored by this recognition from my peers,” Horányi says. “LASP and the Physics Department at ϾƷ are extraordinary communities of talented and passionate people who continually push the boundaries of scientific discovery and space exploration. I feel incredibly fortunate to have had the opportunity to collaborate with so many inspiring colleagues over the past 30 years.”
Horányiis a physicist who conducts theoretical and experimental investigations of space and laboratory complex (dusty) plasmas. He also studies electrodynamic processes and their role in the origin and evolution of the solar system, comets, planetary rings, and plasma surface interactions; dust charging, in situ and remote observations of dust; and dusty plasma laboratory experiments and space hardware development.
He received an M.S. degree in nuclear physics and a PhD in space physics at the Lorand Eotvos University in Budapest, Hungary. While a graduate student, Horányi worked on the Vega mission to comet Halley. At that time, the Russian probes Vega 1 and Vega 2, as well as the European Space Agency Giotto and Japanese missions, were happening, and “the large international interest and the excitement of building instruments that would fly in deep space was mesmerizing to me,” he recalled in “For me, figuring out the most important science questions to ask, which measurements to make, and what is the right balance between capability, reliability, mass, power needs, schedule, and cost remains challenging and exciting ever since.”
Horányi joined the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) in 1992 and the ϾƷ Department of Physics in 1999. He served as a co-investigator for the dust instruments onboard the Ulysses, Galileo, and Cassini missions and as a principal investigator for the dust instruments built by LASP: the Student Dust Counter (SDC) onboard New Horizons, the Cosmic Dust Experiment (CDE) onboard the AIM satellite, and the Lunar Dust Experiment (LDEX) onboard the LADEE mission. He is the principal investigator for the Interstellar Dust Experiment (IDEX) onboard the recently launched IMAP mission.
He is the author or coauthor of more than 300 refereed publications and is a fellow of both the American Physical Society and the American Geophysical Union. The International Astronomical Union renamed Asteroid 1998 AX9 as 164701 Horányi in his honor.
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