APS Presents Awards at Montreal Meeting

The American Physical Society honors the recipients of several of its awards, prizes, and medals at the annual March meeting in Montreal this month from the 22nd to the 26th (see the meeting preview on page 65).

The Biological Physics Prize goes to Peter G. Wolynes, professor of chemistry, biochemistry, and physics at the University of California, San Diego. He is being cited for his “conceptual breakthroughs in protein dynamics and protein folding” and his “critical insights toward the understanding of how proteins work at the most fundamental level.”

Tom C. Lubensky and David R. Nelson are corecipients of the Oliver E. Buckley Prize in Condensed Matter Physics for 2004. They share the prize for their “seminal contributions to the theory of condensed matter systems including the prediction and elucidation of the properties of new, partially ordered phases of complex materials.” Lubensky is the Mary Amanda Wood Professor of Physics and chair of the physics and astronomy department at the University of Pennsylvania. Nelson is Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and professor of applied physics at Harvard University.

Paul Julienne, a NIST fellow, is being honored with the society’s Davisson–Germer Prize in Atomic or Surface Physics for his “pioneering studies of the theory of ultracold atomic collisions and its applications to precision metrology and quantum gas dynamics.”

James P. Wolfe collects the Frank Isakson Prize for Optical Effects in Solids for his “contributions to the fundamental understanding of excitonic matter and ballistic phonons in semiconductors, made possible by pioneering development of graphic imaging techniques.” Wolfe is a professor of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Loren Pfeiffer is being recognized with the James C. McGroddy Prize in New Materials for his “outstanding innovations in molecular beam epitaxy technology and semiconductor materials design that have changed our understanding of the physics of lower-dimensional electron systems.” He is a distinguished member of the technical staff in the semiconductor physics research division at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies.

John Cardy receives the Lars Onsager Prize for his “profound and original applications of conformal invariance to the bulk and boundary properties of two-dimensional statistical systems.” Cardy is a professor of physics at Oxford University and a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

The George E. Pake Prize goes to Robert M. White, University Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. He is being honored for his “visionary leadership as the first Undersecretary of Commerce for Technology, for his outstanding research on the theory of magnetic data storage, and for his leadership at Control Data Corp and Xerox.”

“Trailblazing contributions in the fields of surface-enhanced Raman scattering and nanoparticle optics” garners the society’s Earle K. Plyler Prize for Molecular Spectroscopy for Richard P. Van Duyne, Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University.

Timothy P. Lodge, Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Chemistry at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, takes home the Polymer Physics Prize for his “outstanding contributions to the fundamental understanding of polymer chain diffusion and segmental-chain dynamics.”

Farid Abraham is the winner of the Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics for his “landmark simulations of fracture, [two-dimensional] melting, and properties of membranes.” Abraham is a senior research staff member at IBM’s Al-maden Research Center in San Jose, California.

Nancy Haegel receives the Prize to a Faculty Member for Research in an Undergraduate Institution. She is being cited for her “important contributions to semiconductor materials and semiconductor device physics” and for her “enthusiastic and sustained involvement of undergraduates in her research.” Haegel is a professor of physics at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

APS’s David Adler Lectureship Award in the Field of Materials Physics goes to Chia-Ling Chien for his “path-breaking research in magnetic nanostructures” and his “outstanding mentoring and lecturing in materials physics.” Chien is the Jacob L. Hain Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University.

The recipient of the John H. Dillon Medal for Research in Polymer Physics for 2004 is Marcus Müller, theoretical physicist at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. He is being recognized for the “development of powerful analytic and computational methods and their application to the structure and dynamics of polymers.”

Virgil Elings is being honored with the Joseph F. Keithley Award for Advances in Measurement Science for his “development of scanning probe microscopy through numerous inventions and improvements that led to its commercialization and for providing a role model of the physicist entrepreneur.” Elings is the founder of Digital Instruments and cofounder of Nano-Devices Inc and First Nano Inc.

APS gives its Nicholas Metropolis Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Work in Computational Physics to Frans Pretorius, Richard Chase Tolman Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech. He is being recognized for “innovative developments in numerical relativity including adaptive mesh refinement techniques, black hole excision methods, and visualization software for the community.” His thesis adviser was Matthew W. Choptuik at the University of British Columbia.

The LeRoy Apker Award for undergraduate research at a non–PhD-granting institution goes to Nathaniel Stern for his thesis entitled “Exchange Anisotropy and Giant Magnetoresistance in Thin-Film Spin Valves Containing Ultrathin IrMn Antiferromagnetic Layers.” Stern, now a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, wrote his thesis at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, under the supervision of James Eckert and Patricia Sparks.