Franklin Institute Names Award Winners for 2003

Twelve individuals, including two Nobel Prize winners, will be honored in a ceremony this month at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia for their various achievements in physics, chemistry, Earth science, electrical engineering, civil engineering, computer and cognitive science, and the life sciences. Of the award recipients, eight are being recognized for physics-related work.

John N. Bahcall, Raymond Davis Jr, and Masatoshi Koshiba are sharing the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics for their “work that led to an understanding of neutrino emission from the Sun.” Bahcall, Richard Black Professor of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, “provided the theoretical basis for the experimental work of first Davis, and then Koshiba,” reported the Franklin Institute. Using an underground detector at the Homestake Gold Mine in South Dakota, Davis discovered a striking shortfall in the Sun’s neutrino output. Koshiba led the creation of the Kamiokande water-Čerenkov detector in Japan; the detector’s ability to measure the energies and arrival times and directions of individual neutrinos confirmed and expanded Davis’s provocative result. Davis, emeritus research chemist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Koshiba, emeritus professor of physics at the University of Tokyo, were two of the three winners of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics (see Physics Today, December 2002, page 16 ).

The Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science is going to Paul B. MacCready, chairman of AeroVironment Inc in Monrovia, California. MacCready, “in the spirit of the Wright brothers, has created a series of innovations in the fields of soaring, meteorology, human- and solar-powered flight, upper atmospheric research, and unoccupied and miniature aircraft.” The citation adds that, for “half a century, his exceptional contributions have expanded the frontiers of the science and technology of aeronautics, aeronautical materials, structures energy conservation and utilization, and autonomous and automatic flight.” The award carries a cash prize of $250 000.

Robin M. Hochstrasser is receiving the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Chemistry for “pioneering the development of ultrafast and multidimensional spectroscopies and their applications to gain fundamental molecular-level understanding of the dynamics in complex systems (condensed phases of biomolecules), including energy transfer in solids, reaction mechanisms in liquid solutions, the binding of small molecules on hemoglobin, and the observation of structural changes in proteins.” He is the Donner Professor of Physical Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.

Two recipients are sharing the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Earth Science. Norman A. Phillips and Joseph Smagorinsky are being recognized for their “major contributions to the prediction of weather and climate using numerical methods.” According to the institute, their “seminal and pioneering studies led to … an understanding of the general circulation of the atmosphere, including the transports of heat and moisture that determine the Earth’s climate.” Phillips’s “leadership fostered the development of effective methods for the use of observations in data assimilation systems” and Smagorinsky “played a leading role in establishing the current global observational network for the atmosphere.” Phillips retired in 1988 from his position as a principal scientist, for 14 years, with the National Weather Service’s National Meteorological Center (now the National Centers for Environmental Prediction) in Marlow Heights, Maryland. Smagorinsky retired in 1983 as the director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey.

The Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering is being bestowed on Bishnu S. Atal for his “important work on voice coding, including the concept of speech analysis-by-synthesis coding, leading to the CELP (Code-excited Linear Predictive) Coder.” According to the institute, Atal did pioneering work on Linear Predictive Coding methods that analyze and synthesize speech signals. His invention of the CELP Coder reduced the size of bandwidth needed to transmit speech, thus expanding the carrying capacity of the limited area of the electromagnetic spectrum that cellular callers use. Atal retired in 2002 as a technical director with AT&T Labs in Florham Park, New Jersey.