In Brief

An Indian scientist who has made fundamental contributions to understanding the physical forces that turn liquids into solids is one of two recipients of the new Trieste Science Prize. Tiruppattur V. Ramakrishnan, Department of Atomic Energy Homi Bhabha Chair and professor of physics at Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi, India, won in the category of physics and astronomy “for his pioneering contributions to condensed matter physics, in particular the theory of liquid–solid transition and of electron localization in disordered media.” The award, administered by the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World and accompanied by a $50 000 cash prize, was created to give international recognition and visibility to outstanding scientific achievements by scientists living and working in the developing world. The other recipient is not involved in physics-related work.

Richard Green, the former director of Kitt Peak National Observatory, has been named director of the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory, home of one of the world’s most powerful ground-based telescopes. The LBT, on Mount Graham near Safford, Arizona, is run by the Large Binocular Telescope Corporation, an international collaboration of astronomical institutions. Green, who will also continue as an astronomer at University of Arizona, began his new position on 1 September. He had been director of Kitt Peak since 1997 and is succeeded there by acting director Buell Jannuzi.

The New York Academy of Sciences awarded its Heinz R. Pagels Human Rights Award this year to an eminent physicist and to a science educator. Herman Winick, assistant director and professor emeritus at SLAC’s Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory division and professor emeritus in the applied physics department at Stanford University, and Zafra Margolin Lerman, Distinguished Professor of Science and Public Policy and head of the Institute for Science Education and Science Communication at Columbia College in Chicago, received the award in a September ceremony “in recognition of [their] tireless and effective work on behalf of dissident scientists throughout the world, particularly in Iran.”

John Womersley has joined the Council for the Central Laboratory for the Research Councils in the UK as director of particle physics. Womersley, who began his new post 1 October, is based at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire. For the past year, he was scientific adviser to the associate director of high-energy physics in the US Department of Energy and before that he was at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. In his new position he is responsible for the particle-physics research program and will also advise the CCLRC on its future particle-physics strategy.

Two astronomy professors are co-recipients of this year’s $1 million Shaw Prize in astronomy. Geoffrey Marcy, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the campus’s center for integrative planetary science, and Michel G. Mayor, a professor at Geneva University in Geneva, Switzerland, were awarded the prize for their discovery of more than 110 planets outside our solar system. During a ceremony in September, Shaw Prize officials said the astronomers’ work is “revolutionizing our understanding of the processes that form planets and planetary systems.” Created in 2002, the Shaw Prize is awarded by the Shaw Prize Foundation in Hong Kong.

Joe C. Campbell, an innovator in electrical engineering and nanotechnology who is credited with developing the laser-light detectors used in fiber-optic systems in telecommunications, has been appointed as the Lucien Carr III Professor of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Virginia in Char-ottesville. Campbell will join the faculty of the university’s Charles L. Brown Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in January 2006. He is currently the Cockrell Family Regents Chairman in Engineering and professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has served since 1989.

Boris Blinov has been named assistant professor of physics at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he is a member of the atomic physics group working on experimental quantum information and fundamental tests of quantum mechanics. Prior to beginning his new post in September, Blinov was at the University of Michigan’s Frontiers in Optical Coherent and Ultrafast Science Center and physics department.