Louis John Lanzerotti (born April 16, 1938) is an American physicist. He is a Distinguished Research Professor of physics in the Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) in Newark, New Jersey. His principal research interests have included space plasmas, geophysics, and engineering problems related to the impacts of atmospheric and space processes and the space environment on space and terrestrial technologies. Early life Louis J. Lanzerotti was born and grew up in Carlinville, Illinois. He earned a BS in Engineering Physics in 1960 from University of Illinois. He obtained his MS and PhD degrees, both in Physics, and both from Harvard University in 1963 and 1965 respectively. Career After serving as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, he joined AT&T's Bell Laboratories in 1965 to engage in engineering and scientific research on Earth’s radiation belts, the existence of which was confirmed a few years earlier by James Van Allen. AT&T’s Telstar satellites had recently been launched, providing Lanzerotti and his colleagues with data for analyzing and interpreting the radiation belts and their effects of radiation on space systems. This marked the beginning of Lanzerotti’s leadership in the field now called “space weather.” Lanzerotti's work led to him being named a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Lucent Technologies. Lanzerotti worked with multiple satellite programs and space missions, including the ATS-1 and ATS-3 communications satellites, the interplanetary IMP 4 and IMP 5 explorer missions, the Voyager missions to the outer planets and interstellar medium, the ACE solar wind mission, and the Cassini mission to Saturn. Furthermore, Lanzerotti has been awarded many NSF research grants including as the principal investigator for instruments aboard the Ulysses mission over the poles of the Sun, the Galileo mission to Jupiter, and more recently the Van Allen Probes, launched in 2012 to study Earth's radiation belts. He retired in 2002 and remained a consultant to Alcatel-Lucent through 2008. In 2002, he was appointed a Distinguished Research Professor of Physics in the Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, New Jersey. He has also served as an adjunct professor of electrical engineering at the University of Florida and as a Regents' lecture at UCLA. He is currently Distinguished Research Professor of Physics at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Much of his research has involved close collaborations with telecommunications service providers on commercial satellite and long-haul