AAAS honors achievements

Contributions by scientists, engineers, and journalists were recognized by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the world’s largest international general scientific societies, during a February awards ceremony in St. Louis, Missouri.

Norman R. Augustine, former chief executive officer of Lockheed Martin Corp in Bethesda, Maryland, won the 2005 AAAS Philip Hauge Abelson Prize. Augustine was cited “for his outstanding contributions to US science and technology policy, his unrelenting work to maintain US scientific and technological preeminence and his initiatives to strengthen the scientific partnerships between academia, industry and government.” He is a member of both the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and the US Department of Homeland Security’s Advisory Council.

A 2004 Science paper showing the spin effects in semiconducting materials induced by electric fields along the length of the material has won the AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize, the oldest award conferred by AAAS. The paper’s authors are Roberto C. Myers, Arthur C. Gossard, and David Awschalom, all researchers at the Center for Spintronics and Quantum Computation at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Yuichiro K. Kato, now a postdoctoral scholar in the chemistry operations department at Stanford University in Stanford, California. In a paper published 10 December 2004, they reported the first observation of the spin Hall effect (see Physics Today, February 2005, page 17 ).

Four scientists from the US and three from Russia are sharing the 2005 International Scientific Cooperation Award. The US corecipients are Kyle T. Alfriend, the Distinguished Research Chair Professor of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University; Paul J. Cefola, a lecturer in MIT’s aeronautics and astronautics department in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and an independent consultant in the aerospace industry; Felix R. Hoots, group manager of space programs for San Antonio, Texas–based AT&T; and P. Kenneth Seidelmann, dynamical astronomer and research professor in the astronomy department at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Award recipients from Russia are Andrey I. Nazarenko, chief scientist of the Space Observation Center in the information technologies department at the Russian Aviation–Space Agency in Moscow; Vasiliy S. Yurasov, a project manager for Space Informatics Analytical Systems (KIA Systems) in Moscow; and Stanislav S. Veniaminov, an engineer and leading scientist at the Scientific Research Center of the Russian Department of Defense. The team was honored “for collaborative scientific efforts and pioneering work to advance state-of-the-art space surveillance for the benefit of the global astrodynamics community and the safety of human activity in space.”