Morris B. Cohen has been elected to a two-year term as secretary for the Atmospheric and Space Electricity (ASE) Group in the American Geophysical Union (AGU), effective January 1, 2017. The AGU is the largest Earth and space science society with a total of 60,000 members.

The ASE section covers the physics of charging and discharging of thunderclouds and lightning, radio wave generation and propagation, impacts on the upper atmosphere, and the space environment. This includes a portion of Cohen’s research area, which is global detection and propagation analysis of Low Frequency (LF, 1-500 kHz) radio waves from lightning and radio transmitters, as well as novel antenna techniques to generate LF waves with compact antennas. Applications for this research include global navigation, communication, and geophysical remote sensing of lightning, the near-Earth space environment, and the radiation belts. The LF Radio Lab, led by Cohen, and its students are highly interdisciplinary, combining custom-built cutting edge radio detection hardware, advanced signal processing, and theoretical electromagnetic simulations.

Cohen is an assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, where he has been a faculty member since 2013. He is a winner of the 2015 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award and was also chosen for the 2014 Santimay Basu Prize, an award given once per three years to an under-35 scientist by the International Union of Radio Science (URSI).