Fundamental contributions to human knowledge will be recognized by the National Academy of Sciences in April when it honors achievements in such areas as astronomy, biology, medicine, chemistry, geology, and oceanography. Of the 18 award recipients, 8 engage in physics-related work.
The academy's most prestigious honor, the Public Welfare Medal, goes this year to Maxine F. Singer , president emerita at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Washington, DC. She was chosen “for providing inspired and effective leadership in matters of science and its relationship to education and public policy.”
James R. Ledwell will receive the Alexander Agassiz Medal “for innovative and insightful tracer experiments using sulfur hexafluoride to understand vertical diffusivity and turbulent mixing in the open ocean.” Ledwell, a senior scientist in the department of applied ocean physics and engineering at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, will take home a medal and a $15 000 cash prize.
The Alexander Hollaender Award in Biophysics will go to Barry H. Honig “for pioneering theoretical and computational studies of electrostatic interactions in biological macromolecules and of the energetics of protein folding.” An investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and director of the center for computational biology and bioinformatics at Columbia University, Honig will receive a $20 000 cash prize.
Shanhui Fan, an assistant professor in the electrical engineering department at Stanford University, will be the recipient of the NAS Award for Initiatives in Research. Cited “for innovative research on the theory and applications of photonic crystal devices,” Fan will receive a $15 000 cash prize.
The NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing will be conferred on Geoffrey R. Burbidge “for contributions as editor of The Annual Review of Astronomy from 1974 to 2004, using his vast knowledge to make it the premier astronomy review journal worldwide.” Burbidge, a professor in the physics department at the University of California, San Diego, will receive $10 000.
John P. Grotzinger will be this year's recipient of the Charles Doolittle Walcott Medal, which carries a $10 000 prize. Grotzinger, the Fletcher Jones Professor of Geology in the department of geological and planetary sciences at Caltech in Pasadena, was selected “for the insightful elucidation of ancient carbonates and the stromatolites they contain, and for meticulous field research that has established the timing of early animal evolution.”
The 2007 winners of the James Craig Watson Medal are Michael F. Skrutskie, an astronomy professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, and Roc M. Cutri, the deputy executive director of the infrared processing and analysis center at Caltech. The medal, which carries a $25 000 cash prize plus $25 000 to support the recipient's research, will be bestowed “for their monumental work in developing and completing the Two Micron All-Sky Survey, thus enabling a thrilling variety of explorations in astronomy and astrophysics.”
