APS Members Capture Array of Honors

By Ernie Tretkoff

Several APS members have recently received recognition for their work, including the Enrico Fermi Award, China's International Scientific Collaborations Award, the MacArthur Fellowships, and selection by MIT's Technology Review as "Bold Young Innovators."

Fermi Awards

John Bahcall

The Enrico Fermi Award was presented on October 22 to John Bahcall, Raymond Davis, and Seymour Sack. The award, administered by the Department of Energy, recognizes scientists for their lifetime achievements in the development, use, or production of energy (broadly defined). The Fermi award has been given annually since 1956. Past recipients include John von Neumann, Ernest O. Lawrence, Hans Bethe, and Edward Teller.

Bahcall and Davis, both APS Fellows, received the award for their work on neutrino physics. They received a medal and shared with Sack a $187,500 honorarium. The citation reads: "For their innovative research in astrophysics leading to a revolution in understanding the properties of the elusive neutrino, the lightest known particle with mass."

Bahcall was recently elected APS vice president, and will begin his term in January 2004.

Davis, a research professor at the University of Pennsylvania, was the first to directly detect solar neutrinos, and his work has helped determine that electron neutrinos from the sun and can oscillate into other flavors on their way to Earth. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2002.

Seymour Sack was recognized for his contributions to national security in assuring the reliability of nuclear weapons.

China's International Scientific Collaboration Award

Joe Hamilton of Vanderbilt University received the International Scientific and Technological Collaborations Award of the People's Republic of China?the highest award the Chinese government bestows on foreign scientists. He was honored in Beijing on September 22 in a ceremony presided over by China's Minister of Science and Technology.

Hamilton's award recognizes his efforts bridge the gap between Chinese and American scientists. Since the 1970's, Hamilton has collaborated with Chinese scientists and encouraged them to publish their work in international journals. His research has included studies of nuclear structure in high spin states, nuclei far from stability, and explorations of the fission process.

MacArthur Fellows

Two APS Fellows, Deborah Jin and James Collins, have been awarded 2003 McArthur Fellowships. The MacArthur Fellows program provides unrestricted funds to outstanding individuals who demonstrate exceptional talent, creativity, and promise in any field.

Deborah Jin, 34, is a NIST physicist, a fellow of JILA, and a faculty member in the physics department at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her research group was the first to create a degenerate fermi gas, uses laser cooling and magnetic trapping techniques to explore the properties of super-cooled fermions. In 2002 the APS awarded Jin the Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award, which is given to an outstanding young woman physicist.

James Collins, 38, is a biomedical engineer at Boston University. His theoretical and experimental research has explored the mechanisms regulating biological systems, especially how noise affects biological signals.

Technology Review "Bold Young Innovators"

Seven APS members are among the "100 Bold Young Innovators," in the October 2003 issue of MIT's Technology Review. This is the third year the magazine has named 100 scientists and engineers under 35 whose work is at the cutting edge of computing, biotech, the Internet, nanotech, or other fields. Among this year's winners are the following APS members:

Daniel Gottesman, 33, a research scientist at the Perimeter Institute.

Xiangfeng Duan, 26, a scientist at the Palo Alto-based start-up company Nanosys.

Jordan Katine, 34, a researcher at Hitachi Global Storage Technologies in San Jose, CA.

David Muller, 35, an engineering physics professor at Cornell University.

Yasunobu Nakamura, 35, a researcher at NEC Fundamental Research Laboratories in Tsukuba, Japan.

Ainissa Ramirez, 34, a mechanical engineering professor at Yale University.

Peidong Yang, 32, a chemistry professor at the University of California, Berkeley.