APS News

November 2001 (Volume 10, Number 10)

Physicists Honored at Fall Unit Meetings

Nine APS members were honored with prizes and awards at the fall meetings of three separate units. The 2001 Arthur Schawlow Prize was presented at the Interdisciplinary Laser Science Conference in Long Beach, CA, October 14-18. The ILS is the annual meeting of the APS Division of Laser Science. At the APS Division of Plasma Physics meeting, also held in Long Beach, October 29-November 2, physicists were honored with the Maxwell Prize, the Excellence in Plasma Physics Award, and the award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis in Plasma Physics. Finally, the Fluid Dynamics Prize and Otto Laporte Award will be presented later this month at the meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics, November 18-20, in San Diego, CA.

ARTHUR SCHAWLOW PRIZE

David J. Wineland
National Institute of Standards & Technology

Citation: "For an extraordinary range of pioneering studies combining trapped ions and lasers."

Wineland received his PhD in 1970 from Harvard University and spent five years as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington before joining what was then known as the National Bureau of Standards as a staff scientist. His research interests are focused on the laser cooling and spectroscopy of trapped ions with applications to atomic clocks, cold plasmas, and fundamental tests; quantum state engineering with applications to quantum information processing and quantum-limited measurement. He has won numerous prizes and awards for his research over the years, including the 1990 APS Davisson-Germer Prize.

JAMES CLERK MAXWELL PRIZE

Roald Sagdeev
University of Maryland

Citation: "For an unmatched set of contributions to modern plasma theory including, collisionless shocks, stochastic magnetic fields, ion temperature gradient instabilities, quasi-linear theory, neoclassical transport, and weak turbulence theory."

Sagdeev is a Distinguished University Professor of the University of Maryland, College Park, and director of the East West Space Science Center in the Department of Physics. After graduating from Moscow State University in the 1950s, he became a member of the controlled fusion team at Kurchtov Institute of Atomic Energy in Moscow, where he was a driving force behind the development in our understanding of nonlinear phenomena in rarefied plasmas. In 1961 he founded the Plasma Theory Lab at the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics in Novosibirsk, expanding the original scope of his work on nonlinear plasmas. And from 1973-1988 he was director of Moscow's Institute for Space Research. He was also politically involved as an advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev on arms control and space, and in 1989 was elected to the USSR Congress of Peoples Deputies, together with fellow physicist Andrei Sakharov.

EXCELLENCE IN PLASMA PHYSICS AWARD

Keith H. Burrell
General Atomics

Richard Joseph Groebner
General Atomics

Edward Doyle
University of California, Los Angeles

Edmund J. Synakowski
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory

Citation: "For experiments that show that sheared ExB flows can suppress turbulence and transport in tokamak plasmas, and that such flows can spontaneously arise at the edge and in the core of tokamak plasmas."

Burrell received his PhD from CalTech in 1974 and has spent the last 27 years at General Atomics working on a variety of experimental and theoretical topics in controlled fusion research. He is currently program manager in the company's Experimental Science Division, overseeing fusion research work on the D-III-D tokamak. His primary research focus is on energy and angular momentum transport in tokamak plasma, and he has helped develop numerous diagnostics, including the highly successful charge exchange recombination spectroscopy technique.

Since obtaining his PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1979, Groebner has been employed by General Atomics in San Diego, CA. A major focus of his research has been the development of diagnostic techniques, using charge exchange recombination spectroscopy, for the measurement of ion temperature and velocity profiles. He implemented such a system to study the boundary plasma on the DIII-D tokamak and discovered that the edge radial electric field became more negative when the plasma made a transition to an improved confinement mode, called the H mode. He has helped foster H-mode research as leader of H-mode studies on DIII-D.

Doyle received his BE and MEngSc degrees in Electrical Engineering from the National University of Ireland, University College Cork in 1980 and 1982. From 1980 to 1985 he was a research associate at the UKAEA Culham Laboratory, where he developed a far-forward scattering system for the TOSCA tokamak. In 1985 he joined the research staff at UCLA, where he is currently a senior researcher in the Electrical Engineering Dept. and Institute for Plasma Science and Technology. At UCLA he has pursued applications of advanced Far Infra-Red and mm-wave diagnostic systems to improve fundamental understanding of plasma turbulence and transport. In 1989 he joined the collaborative research team at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility, San Diego to study turbulence changes associated with the formation of edge and internal transport barriersssion effects.

Synakowski received his PhD in physics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1988, having performed spectroscopic studies of plasma impurity transport on the TEXT tokamak. Since then he has been a member of the research staff at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, where he is currently deputy program director of the National Spherical Torus Experiment. His most recent research efforts include a focus on bifurcating plasma systems and studies of the effects of sheared plasma flows on transport and transport barried dynamics. He has recently extended this work to include joint research on the DIII-D tokamak at General Atomics.

OUTSTANDING DOCTORAL THESIS IN PLASMA PHYSICS AWARD

Kevin James Bowers
University of California, Berkeley

Citation: "For comprehensive and insightful theories and simulations of electron series resonant (ESR) diodes and ESR surface-wave plasmas, which showed how distributed slow-wave excitation might produce large area plasma discharges for processing and other applications."

Bowers graduated with highest distinction from Purdue University in 1997 with a BS in electrical engineering. He received his PhD in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, earlier this year, with thesis work on high frequency plasma surface waves. Since then he has joined Agere Systems (formerly the Lucent Bell Labs Microelectronics Corporation), where he has been investigating mesoscopic and nanoscopic photonic devices and manufacturing. His research interests include electromagnetics, plasmas, quantum electronics, and scientific computing.

FLUID DYNAMICS PRIZE

Howard Brenner
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Citation: "For his outstanding and sustained research in physico-chemical hydrodynamics, the quality of his monographs and textbooks, and his long-standing service to the fluid mechanics community."

Born and raised in New York City, Brenner received his PhD in chemical engineering from New York University in 1957. His 46-year career as a chemical engineering faculty member has included stints at NYU, Carnegie-Mellon University, the University of Rochester, and MIT, where he is currently W.H. Dow Professor. The co-author of three books on fluid dynamics, his lifelong research interests focus on modeling particulate physico-chemical transport processes. Current research efforts involve modeling chromatographic bio-particle separation processes in microfluidic devices and, more fundamentally, quantifying the molecular and convective transport of volume.

OTTO LAPORTE AWARD

John Kim
University of California, Los Angeles

Citation: "For his pioneering work in the development of direct numerical simulation as a tool in turbulence research, and for his important contributions to the understanding of the physics and control of turbulent boundary layers."

Kim received his BS degree from Seoul National University in Korea and earned an MS from Brown University before completing his PhD in mechanical engineering at Stanford University in 1978. Before joining UCLA, he conducted research in the areas of transition and turbulence physics at NASA's Ames Research Center, serving as chief of the Turbulence and Transition Physics Branch. He is currently active in investigating control strategies for turbulent boundary layers, using systems theoretic approaches. Since 1998 he has been the editor of the journal Physics of Fluids.

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Editor: Alan Chodos
Associate Editor: Jennifer Ouellette

November 2001 (Volume 10, Number 10)

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Articles in this Issue
APS Members Elect Helen Quinn as Society’s Next Vice President
APS Teachers Prep Program Gets Full Funding from NSF
APS News Survey Tracks Chinese Student Visa Problems
TSAI Program Winds Up Successful Seven-Year Run
Happy Birthday Enrico!
Physicists Honored at Fall Unit Meetings
Meeting Briefs
Letters
Viewpoint
Zero Gravity: The Lighter Side of Science
Members in the Media
This Month in Physics History
Focus on Committees
Spotlight on the Profession of Physics
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