Eugene L. Tattini will become the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s deputy director in August, succeeding Larry N. Dumas, who will be retiring after nine years in that position. Tattini, who joined JPL this month to spend several weeks in orientation before taking his new post, was commander of the Space and Missile Systems Center at Los Angeles Air Force Base. He retired from the Air Force after nearly 36 years of service.
Orlando Figueroa became the acting director of NASA’s Mars exploration program, Office of Space Science, at NASA headquarters in Washington, DC, this past May. Formerly the deputy chief engineer for systems engineering at NASA headquarters, Figueroa replaced G. Scott Hubbard, who is now the deputy center director for research at NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California.
At a ceremony in May in Canberra, the Australian Academy of Sciences awarded Bruce Hobbs the Jaeger Medal for “investigations of a high order into the solid earth or oceans of Australia,” according to the citation. Hobbs is deputy chief executive of the minerals and energy research sector of CSIRO, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, in Perth, Australia.
Last month, the Ho-Am Foundation, located in South Korea, presented awards to winners in five categories at a ceremony in Seoul. Of those winners, two are doing physics-related work. Edward C. Lim, Goodyear Professor of Chemistry at the University of Akron, received the 2001 Ho-Am Prize for Science in recognition of “his distinguished contribution to and pioneering research in laser spectroscopy and photophysics of organic molecules, which resulted in his discovery of the proximity effect governing the rate of electronic relaxation in photoexcited organics,” according to the foundation. Dong Nyung Lee, a professor of materials science and engineering at Seoul National University, won the 2001 Ho-Am Prize for Engineering, which acknowledged “his distinguished contribution to the field of metallic materials and his discovery of the strain energy release maximization theory explaining the transformation of fabrication textures into recrystallization textures.” Each honoree received a diploma, gold medal, and 100 million won (about $77‥000).
Fusion researcher and plasma diagnostics specialist Kenneth Young received the US Department of Energy’s Distinguished Associate Award in April at a dinner in Princeton, New Jersey. The occasion was his retirement that same month as head of international collaborations at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. The DOE citation acknowledged, in part, that his “dedicated efforts have had a major impact on the diagnostics systems that bind theory and experiment together in advancing fusion.” Young had joined the lab in 1974.
