David De Young will begin a three-year term in August as president of the Aspen Center for Physics in Colorado. De Young, a senior scientific staff member at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, will succeed Eric D’Hoker, who has been the center’s president since 1998. Following his term as president, D’Hoker plans to remain actively involved in affairs of the center. He also will be associated with UCLA’s new Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics and will return to full-time research on string theory.
Ying Wu, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, will be joining Duke University next month as an assistant professor of physics.
Congressmen Rodney P. Frelinghuysen (R-NJ) and Rush Holt (D-NJ) each received the Science Coalition’s Champion of Science Award in an April ceremony at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in recognition of their support for federal funding of university-based science research. The Washington, DC-based Science Coalition, which represents more than 400 member organizations, works to expand and strengthen the federal government’s investment in university-based scientific, medical, engineering, and agricultural research.
In March, B. Grant Logan was named director of the Heavy-Ion Fusion Virtual National Laboratory (VNL), a collaborative venture of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. Logan, who previously was deputy director of VNL, succeeds Roger O. Bangerter, who retired and will continue to work on heavy-ion inertial fusion.
Jill Dahlburg joined General Atomics in San Diego, California, in February as director of the division of inertial fusion technology and as codirector, with Vincent Chan, of the center for fusion theory. She previously was head of the distributed sensor technology office in the Naval Research Laboratory’s tactical electronic warfare division.
The National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, has hired Annick Pouquet as the first full-time director of the center’s geophysical turbulence program. She previously was director of research at the Observatory of the Côte d’Azur in Nice, France, and director of the observatory’s Cassini Laboratory.
Sharon Glotzer, who was cofounder and director of the Center for Theoretical and Computational Materials Science at NIST in Gaithersburg, Maryland, joined the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in January to establish a laboratory for soft-materials simulation and to create, with other computational materials faculty, a new multidisciplinary center for materials simulation.
In February, the Eastern New York Intellectual Property Law Association in Albany honored James J. Wynne, Rangaswamy Srinivasan, and Samuel E. Blum as Inventors of the Year for 2001 for their “promotion of progress in the science and useful arts in the field of Far Ultraviolet Surgical and Dental Procedures,” according to the citation. The trio discovered “that excimer laser light could etch biological tissue with no apparent damage to the tissue underlying the etched volume. Their discovery laid the foundation for techniques for changing the curvature of the human cornea.” Wynne is program manager for local education outreach at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. Srinivasan and Blum both retired from IBM in 1990. The award was accompanied by a legislative resolution from the New York State Senate that proclaimed 12–16 February 2001 as National Inventor’s Week.
The Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, awarded its Pontecorvo Prize to George Zatsepin and Vladimir Gavrin in January for their “outstanding contributions to solar neutrino research using the gallium–germanium method at the Baksan Neutrino Observatory [affiliated with the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences (INR RAS) in Moscow],” according to the citation. Gavrin is head of the Gallium–Germanium Neutrino Telescope Laboratory at the observatory and head of the Laboratory for Radiochemical Methods of Detection of Neutrinos with the INR RAS. Zatsepin heads the INR RAS’s department of high-energy leptons and neutrino astrophysics.
Earlier this year, the University of Cambridge awarded Sandu Popescu with the 2001 Adams Prize, acknowledging that his “research in quantum physics has revolutionized the field and has already resulted in the first experimental demonstration of quantum teleportation, involving a single particle of light.” Popescu is a professor of physics at Bristol University in the UK and a member of Hewlett-Packard’s Basic Research Institute in the Mathematical Sciences in Bristol.
