APS Honors Awardees

The American Physical Society recognized a number of scientists in 2005 for their contributions to physics. Awards and prizes were distributed during an August ceremony in Baltimore, Maryland.

Receiving the 2004 Andreas Acrivos Dissertation Award was Jacqueline Ashmore, a technologist at Tiax LLC in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Ashmore, whose thesis adviser was Howard A. Stone at Harvard University, received the award “for elegant theoretical and numerical analyses of coating and free-surface flows.”

The division of atomic, molecular, and optical physics gave two DAMOP Dissertation Awards in 2005. Markus Greiner, an assistant professor of physics at Harvard University, was recognized for realizing a “quantum phase transition from a superfluid to a Mott insulator in a gas of ultracold atoms.” James K. Thompson, a postdoctoral fellow at the MIT—Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms in Cambridge, Massachusetts, received the honor for “testing E = mc ² with a two-ion mass balance.”

Eduard Pozdeyev received the 2005 Award for Outstanding Dissertation in Beam Physics “for pioneering research on space charge effects of beams in the isochronous regime, including simulations and experimental verification following the design and construction of the Small Isochronous Ring.” Pozdeyev is an accelerator physicist at the Center for Advanced Studies of Accelerators at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, Virginia.

Receiving the I. I. Rabi Prize for 2005 was Deborah S. Jin, NIST fellow and adjoint associate professor of physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Jin was recognized “for her pioneering work in the production of degenerate Fermi gases and exploitation of their novel physical properties.”

Murtadha A. Khakoo, professor of physics at California State University in Fullerton, was the recipient of the 2005 Prize for Research in an Undergraduate Institution. Khakoo was honored “for his challenging and sophisticated experiments in electron-atom collisions that have provided significant tests of atomic theory and for his energetic, sustained mentoring of students in his research.”

APS awarded its Arthur Schawlow Prize for 2005 to Marlan O. Scully, a Distinguished Professor of Physics at Texas A&M University in College Station who also holds the rank of professor in mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey. Scully was recognized “for his many far-reaching contributions to quantum optics and quantum electronics and, in particular, for the quantum theory of lasers, for the theory of free-electron lasers and laser gyros, and for theoretical and experimental contributions to optical coherence effects.”

Vladimir E. Fortov, president of the Institute for High Energy Densities of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow and professor and chair director of the High Energy Physics Chair at the Moscow Institute of Science and Technology, is the 2005 recipient of the Shock Compression Science Award. Fortov was honored “for pioneering research in high-energy density physics, strongly coupled plasmas, hot-condensed matter, shock-compression science, and their applications.”