In Brief

Roy D. Bridges Jr has stepped down from his post as director of NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, and Julian M. Earls, director of NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, has announced he will leave at year’s end. Bridges, who is working through the end of the year on a special NASA project, was Langley’s director from August 2003 until October 2005. Before that, he was director of the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, from March 1997 to August 2003. At press time, Earls, who was deputy director of Glenn before assuming the post of director in 2003, was mulling an offer from Alabama A&M University in Huntsville, Alabama, to come aboard as president.

After three years as director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, Jefferson Davis Howell Jr is leaving to join the University of Texas at Austin. NASA has not yet named a successor, and Howell will stay on until a replacement is found. Previously, he was a contract senior vice president and program manager at the center.

R eviews of Modern Physics has named Achim Richter, a professor at the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Darmstadt, Germany, as its editor. He will be responsible for the journal’s editorial standards, policies, and direction and for the leadership of a board of associate editors. Richter will maintain his professorship and will assume the editor’s post in January. He succeeds George Bertsch, who is retiring after a 10-year tenure.

In July, Boris Altshuler joined the faculty of Columbia University in New York City, where he is teaching and conducting research in theoretical condensed matter physics. Altshuler had been a physics professor at Princeton University since 1996.