In brief

Philip H. Bucksbaum has joined the faculty of Stanford University to direct the new Ultrafast Science Center, a partnership between Stanford and the US Department of Energy. Bucksbaum will also be a professor at SLAC and in Stanford’s applied physics department. Through the winter term he is continuing as the Peter Franken Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Michigan, where he has been since 1990. Bucksbaum was named to his new post last October.

Michael L. Coats has been named director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, replacing Jefferson D. Howell Jr, who is on assignment as a visiting professor to the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. A former astronaut, Coats began his new position last November and is responsible for overseeing the center, which is NASA’s primary operations center for space flight. Coats is the ninth director in Johnson’s 44-year history. He had been vice president of Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Denver.

The American Association of Physics Teachers in College Park, Maryland, has named Charles H. Holbrow its senior staff physicist, a new position for the society. Holbrow is Charles A. Dana Professor of Physics Emeritus at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, a visiting physics professor at MIT, and a visiting associate at Harvard University’s physics department. He began last October at his AAPT post, in which he is developing programs to help make the society more useful to college and university physics faculty.

Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, has hired Madappa Prakash as a physics professor. As part of his new position, Prakash is also a member of the university’s Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics and is contributing to a newly funded joint research initiative between nuclear physics and astrophysics. Prior to beginning at his post in September 2005, Prakash was a research professor at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, New York.

William M. Yen, Graham Perdue Professor of Physics at the University of Georgia in Athens, has been selected as winner of the ICL Prize for Luminescence Research and will receive the international award at July ceremonies in Beijing. The honor from the International Conference on Luminescence is being given for Yen’s “pioneering discoveries in the dynamics of solid state optical processes and for exceptional leadership in the field of luminescence.” The prize was established in 1984 and is awarded in conjunction with the tri-annual International Conference on Luminescence. Yen will receive a plaque and C2000 (about $2500).