On 1 January 2004, John Bahcall of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, will be the new vice president of the American Physical Society. Bahcall, who will become the society’s presidentelect in 2005 and president in 2006, succeeds Marvin Cohen (see Physics Today, November 2002, page 88). Helen Quinn is the society’s president for 2004 (see Physics Today, December 2001, page 70).
Bahcall received all of his professional degrees in physics: his AB from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1956; his MS from the University of Chicago in 1957; and his PhD in 1961 from Harvard University. After spending two years as a research fellow at Indiana University, Bahcall taught physics at Caltech, where he remained for the next eight years.
Since 1971, Bahcall has been affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study. He is currently the Richard Black Professor of Natural...
