Ethan Vishniac

Vishniac graduated from University of Rochester and Harvard University.^[1] He received his Ph.D. in astrophysics in 1980 from Harvard University while working under the direction of William H. Press.^[2] After Harvard, Vishniac spent two years as a post doctoral fellow working under Jeremiah P. Ostriker at Princeton University.

His best known scientific work is the study of instabilities in expanding blast waves. In Vishniac (1983), he demonstrated that a blast wave expanding in a sufficiently compressible medium would be subject to a linear overstability growing as the square root of time. This is usually known as the Vishniac instability, and generally occurs in any thin enough slab bounded by a shock on one side and a contact discontinuity to a higher temperature region on the other. In Vishniac (1994) he then demonstrated that a thin-enough slab bounded by shocks on both sides is subject to a nonlinear instability, usually described as a nonlinear thin shell instability (NTSI). He has also worked with success in cosmology and the theory of astrophysical dynamos.

• 2001: Elected Fellow of the American Physical Society "for pioneering contributions to the study of blast-wave stability, the generation of secondary anisotropies in the microwave background, and the study of MHD turbulence and dynamos in astrophysical objects."^[3]

He is the son of microbiologist Wolf V. Vishniac and grandson of photographer Roman Vishniac. His wife Ilene Busch-Vishniac, the ninth president of the University of Saskatchewan (2012–2014), was previously Dean of the Faculty of Engineering at Johns Hopkins, and provost and vice-president (academic) of McMaster University from 2007 until 2012.

• Vishniac, E. T. 1983, Astrophys. J., 274, 152
• Vishniac, E. T. 1994, Astrophys. J., 428, 186

• Official website  
• A current list of refereed papers from NASA ADS