In Brief

On 1 January, Norman Chonacky replaced Francis Sullivan as the editor of Computing in Science & Engineering magazine, a copublication of the American Institute of Physics and the IEEE Computer Society. Chonacky was recently appointed to a research fellowship at the Center for United Nations Studies in the department of political science at Yale University. Sullivan now directs the IDA Center for Computing Sciences in Bowie, Maryland.

The Materials Research Society bestowed three MRS Medals last December during its fall meeting in Boston. Jacob Israelachvili, professor in three departments—chemical engineering, materials science, and biomolecular science and engineering—at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was cited for his “work on adhesion and friction, which has revolutionized the understanding of molecular mechanisms responsible for these technologically vital phenomena.” Toh-Ming Lu, the Ray Palmer Baker Distinguished Professor of Physics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, and Sunil K. Sinha, LANSCE Professor of Physics at the University of California, San Diego, were honored together for “seminal contributions to understanding mechanisms of thin-film surface and interface morphology evolution and establishing the foundations of diffraction and scattering methods for its quantitative analysis.”

Thom H. Dunning Jr became the third director of the NSF-funded National Center for Supercomputing Applications, located on the Urbana–Champaign campus of the University of Illinois. Prior to joining NCSA in January, Dunning was director of the Joint Institute for Computational Sciences, a joint endeavor of the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering for 2004 was presented to John P. Smol on 6 December by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. The annual presentation ceremony for NSERC’s highest honor, named for the late Canadian Nobel laureate, was held at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. Smol will receive Can$1 million (about $780 000) from NSERC over the next five years to fund his research on the reconstruction of past environments. He is a professor in the biology department, Canada Research Chair in Environmental Change, and codirector of the Paleoecological Environmental Assessment and Research Laboratory, all at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.

James B. Garvin, most recently chief scientist for NASA’s Mars and lunar exploration programs, was appointed chief scientist of the entire agency last October. He succeeds veteran astronaut John M. Grunsfeld, who has returned to NASA’s Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston, Texas, to train for a long-duration flight aboard the International Space Station.

Richard Price has joined the physics department in the department of physics and astronomy at the University of Texas at Brownsville after 33 years as a physics professor at the University of Utah.

The Academy of Science of South Africa bestowed its highest honor, the Gold Medal for Science-for-Society, on Brian Warner at a ceremony last fall. Warner was cited for providing “science of benefit to the public.” He is a distinguished professor of natural philosophy in the faculty of science at the University of Cape Town and heads the university’s astronomy department.

John Loughhead was appointed executive director of the UK Energy Research Centre, located on the campus of Imperial College London. A former vice president of technology for Alstom in its Paris head office, he started at UKERC last November.

On 6 December, Susan Hockfield became the 16th president of MIT. She was previously provost and a professor of neurobiology at Yale University.

Roger Raab received the De Beers Gold Medal, the highest honor given by the South African Institute of Physics, at the institute’s annual conference held last July in Bloemfontein, South Africa. Raab, professor emeritus of physics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Pietermaritzburg, has “made a truly impressive contribution to his research field of theoretical and experimental molecular physics,” according to the citation. “One of his crowning achievements,” the citation says, “has been to complete the development of multiple theory.”