This month, Jeremiah P. Ostriker, Charles A. Young Professor in the astrophysical sciences department at Princeton University, joins Cambridge University in the UK as the Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy for a three-year term. Until this past August, he also was the provost at Princeton. Ostriker will return to Princeton after the position at Cambridge ends.
At the European Crystallographic Meeting in Krakow, Poland, in August, the European Crystallographic Association awarded this year’s European Crystallography Prize to Jochen R. Schneider, head of the Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (HASYLAB) at the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg, Germany, and director of research for synchrotron radiation and free electron lasers at DESY. Schneider was honored for “his pioneering work on the application of gamma-ray spectroscopy and his high-energy synchrotron radiation studies, as well as his more recent involvement in the development of the free electron laser.”
Martin Newcomb joins the University of Illinois at Chicago this fall as Liberal Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Chemistry. Newcomb, whose research primarily involves physical studies of biological processes, had been a professor of chemistry at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, since 1991.
In August, at a conference in Kyoto, Japan, the International Organization for Crystal Growth gave two prizes for outstanding contributions to the field. Sam Coriell, a researcher at NIST in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and Don T. J. Hurle, a professor of physics at the University of Bristol in the UK, jointly received the Frank Prize for research they presented at the conference. Coriell’s winning paper was entitled “Applications of Morphological Stability Theory” and Hurle’s was “Charged Native Point Defects in GaAs and Other III-V Compounds.” The Laudise Prize went to Georg Müller, a professor of materials science at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany, for his paper “Experimental Analysis and Modeling of Melt Growth Processes.”
In June, the UK’s Millennium Science Forum jointly awarded Tokushi Kizuka and Katsuya Shimizu this year’s Sir Martin Wood Prize, which is given to a young Japanese researcher working in condensed matter science. Kizuka, an assistant professor of applied physics at Nagoya University, was recognized for his research on direct atomistic observation of structural dynamics in solids. Shimizu, a research associate in the department of materials physics at Osaka University, was acknowledged for his research involving the search for superconductivity under ultrahigh pressure. Both recipients gave lectures on their award-winning research at Oxford and Cambridge universities. Oxford Instruments launched the Millennium Science Forum in 1999 to promote research in condensed matter science and to encourage scientific exchange between Japan and the UK.
Ray Baughman, who was previously a corporate fellow with Honeywell International in Morristown, New Jersey, recently moved to head a new nanotechnology institute and fill the Robert A. Welch Chair in Chemistry at the University of Texas at Dallas. Anvar Zakhidov joined Baughman to help start up the institute. Now a professor of physics at Texas, Zakhidov was formerly a senior principal scientist at Honeywell. Also on board as research scientists at the new institute are Alan Dalton, previously a research fellow in physics at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland; Igor Efimov, who was a researcher with the University of Leicester in the UK; and Edgar Munoz, who was a PhD student at the Institute for Coal Research and the Institute of Materials Research of Aragon in Saragossa, Spain.
James Peebles, emeritus Albert Einstein Professor of Science at Princeton University, garnered the 2001 Harvey Prize in Science and Technology. At a ceremony in June, the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology presented Peebles the award in recognition of “his classic work on cosmic microwave background radiation and setting the physical basis for the hot Big Bang theory.” The institute also praised him for “his seminal contributions to the understanding of the origin of our universe, the creation of the lightest elements, and the formation of galaxies and clustering” and for “his leadership in defining the challenges of modern cosmology during the last 40 years.”
Of the eight 2001 Innovation Awards presented by Discover magazine in June, four were given for physics-related work. Robert Winglee, associate chair of the department of earth and space sciences at the University of Washington, Seattle, won in the aerospace category for his development of M2P2, a mini-magnetospheric plasma propulsion system. In the communications category, Aharon Agranat was recognized for helping to develop Electroholography™, a method to interconnect electronic processors by holographic devices. He is the founder and director of Trellis Photonics, headquartered in Jerusalem, Israel, and holds the N. Jolla Chair of Applied Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Joseph M. Jacobson was honored in the electronics category for his innovation: printed inorganic chips. He is an associate professor at the MIT Media Laboratory. Robert Wind received the award in the health category for the development of the combined optical and magnetic resonance microscope. Wind is a staff scientist at the US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Washington. At the same ceremony, the Christopher Columbus Fellowship Foundation presented the Christopher Columbus Foundation Award to Richard A. Craig, a staff scientist at PNNL, for developing the timed neutron detector. The foundation selected Craig from among the Discover awards nominees. The award has a cash prize of $100‥000.
This past June, Erwin Frey became a professor of theoretical physics at the Free University of Berlin and director of the theoretical physics department of the Hahn-Meitner Institute in Berlin. Frey, a theoretical biophysicist, was previously a Heisenberg fellow at both the Technical University of Munich and Harvard University.
The Japan Academy presented nine prizes, including one for physics-related work, this past June at a ceremony in Tokyo. A Japan Academy Prize went to physics researcher Atsuhiro Nishida, who supervises the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and is an emeritus professor at the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science in Sagamihara, Japan. Nishida received the award for his studies on Earth’s magnetospheric structure and plasma convection.
In March, Swapan Chattopadhyay took his new post as associate director for accelerators with the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab). He previously served as director of the Center for Beam Physics at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and as a visiting professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley.
