The Eric Liljencrantz Award is given for basic research into the problems of acceleration, altitude, or weightlessness, or for excellence as an educator in aerospace medicine. It is sponsored by the Aerospace Medical Association.

Angus H. Rupert, M.D., Ph.D., FAsMA, CAPT, MC, USN (Ret.), is this year’s winner of the Eric Liljencrantz Award. He is being honored for his distinguished career in the U.S. Navy as a flight medicine expert who is particularly known for his encyclopedic human systems integration knowledge and how the neuro-vestibular system affects performance in aerospace systems. He has conducted airborne research for the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, and NASA both at the basic science level as well as the translational research level using devices he invented with regard to human responses in accelerative environments. While detailed to NASA he conducted research examining both motion sickness countermeasures and devised techniques to maintain hypergravity for prolonged periods with minimal cross-coupled Coriolis forces. This provided psychophysical data in uncharted areas, permitting extension of the envelope for modeling spatial disorientation. He has also given lectures on Neil Armstrong’s sense of vection during the first lunar landing, suggesting a neurological mechanism for it.