APS Presents Awards at April Meeting

The American Physical Society will honor 12 individuals and one collaboration at its meeting this month in Tampa, Florida.

Stan Woosley is receiving the Hans A. Bethe Prize for “his significant and wide-ranging contributions in the areas of stellar evolution, element synthesis, the theory of core collapse and type Ia supernovae, and the interpretation of gamma-ray bursts— most notably, the collapsar model of gamma-ray bursts,” according to the citation. He is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The Tom W. Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics is going to Roy J. Holt, senior physicist and chief of the medium-energy physics group at Argonne National Laboratory. He is being recognized for “his pioneering role in experimental studies of the structure of the deuteron and especially for his innovative use of polarization techniques in these experiments.”

Bryce S. DeWitt is being honored posthumously with the Einstein Prize “for a broad range of original contributions to gravitational physics, especially in quantum gravity, gauge field theories, radiation reaction in curved spacetime, and numerical relativity; and for inspiring a generation of students.” He was the Jane and Roland Blumberg Professor Emeritus in Physics at the University of Texas at Austin until his death last September.

Robert H. Austin has garnered the Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize “for his pioneering and creative work in applying advanced techniques in experimental physics to significant problems in biological physics, and for his skill in communicating the excitement of his research to a wide range of audiences.” He is a professor of physics at Princeton University.

The W. K. H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics will be presented to Piermaria J. Oddone, deputy director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, “for his insightful proposal to use an asymmetric B-factory to carry out precision measurements of CP violation in B-meson decays, and for his energetic leadership of the first conceptual design studies that demonstrated the feasibility of this approach.” He will become the director of Fermilab in July.

Susumu Okubo is receiving the J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics “for groundbreaking investigations into the pattern of hadronic masses and decay rates, which provided essential clues into the development of the quark model, and for demonstrating that CP violation permits partial decay rate asymmetries.” He is a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Rochester.

The recipient of the Robert R. Wilson Prize for Achievement in the Physics of Particle Accelerators is Keith R. Symon, emeritus professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is being acknowledged “for fundamental contributions to accelerator science, including the FFAG concept and the invention of the RF phase manipulation technique that was essential to the success of the ISR and all subsequent hadron colliders.”

For his thesis “Large R-Charged Sectors of the AdS/CFT Correspondence,” written at Princeton University under the supervision of Curtis Callan and Steven Gubser, Jonathan Heckman has garnered the LeRoy Apker Award for undergraduate research done at a PhD-granting institution. Heckman is currently a PhD student at Harvard University.

Lawrence M. Krauss is getting the Joseph A. Burton Forum Award “for major contributions in defending science in the schools through his efforts in combating the opponents of teaching evolution, and for continuing to enhance the public understanding of contemporary physics.” He is the Ambrose Swasey Professor of Physics, professor of astronomy, chair of the physics department, and director of the center for education and research in cosmology and astrophysics at Case Western Reserve University.

Martin J. Klein, Eugene Higgins Professor Emeritus of Physics and History of Science at Yale University, will receive the inaugural Abraham Pais Award for History of Physics “for his pioneering studies in the history of 19th- and 20th-century physics, which embody the highest standards of scholarship and literary expression and have profoundly influenced generations of historians of physics.”

The Francis M. Pipkin Award is going to Ronald L. Walsworth “for broad investigation in precision measurements involving masers; in particular, for using hydrogen and noble-gas masers in achieving record sensitivities to violations of Lorentz and CPT symmetry in neutrons and protons, and for innovative applications of masers to imaging.” He is a senior lecturer in the Harvard University physics department and a physicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

The APS study group on boost-phase intercept systems for national missile defense, cochaired by Daniel Kleppner (MIT) and Frederick K. Lamb (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), is the recipient of the Leo Szilard Lectureship Award, “in recognition of the work of the Study Group in producing a report that adds physics insight to the public debate.”

Andriy Kurylov has garnered the Dissertation in Nuclear Physics Award “for his theoretical work on electroweak radiative corrections to precision low-energy processes, including calculations of neutrino–deuterium scattering needed to interpret solar neutrino data and other calculations to constrain limits for physics beyond the standard model.” He received his PhD from the University of Connecticut under the supervision of Michael Ramsey-Musolf and is now working for McKinsey & Co in Minneapolis, Minnesota.