Saul A. Teukolsky, the Hans A. Bethe Professor in Physics and Astrophysics at Cornell Univeristy, has been named director of the Center for Radiophysics and Space Research (CRSR), one of the two research centers of the Cornell astronomy department. Teukolsky succeeds Peter Gierasch, professor of astronomy, who had been director of CRSR since 1984. The directorship has a five-year renewable term.

CRSR was founded in 1959 by Thomas Gold, now the J. L. Wetherill Professor Emeritus of Astronomy at Cornell, to foster cooperation with astronomers, engineers, geologists and other researchers with specialties relevant to space sciences. Today the center administers nearly 100 Cornell research grants and contracts with a value of about $15 million a year.

Teukolsky was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and earned his B.Sc., in both physics and applied mathematics, at the University of the Witwatersrand. He received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1973 at the California Institute of Technology, where his thesis adviser was the eminent astrophysicist Kip Thorne.

Teukolsky joined the Cornell faculty as an assistant professor in 1974, becoming a full professor in 1983. He has been a Sloan Foundation Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996.

The Cornell astronomy department also is associated with the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center, which administers and maintains the radio-radar telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, under an agreement with the National Science Foundation.