In Brief

Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and a Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Cambridge, takes office this month as the master of Trinity College, Cambridge University.

US Navy Rear Admiral Thomas Q. Donaldson V becomes the director of NASA’s John C. Stennis Space Center in South Mississippi on 5 January. Donaldson previously was the commander of the Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command at Stennis. He replaces interim director Michael Rudolphi, who moved in December to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, where he manages the Space Shuttle Propulsion Office.

Garry W. Rogerson took the reins last month as the new CEO of Varian Inc in Palo Alto, California. Rogerson, who has a PhD in biochemistry, had been the company’s president and chief operating officer and will retain the title of president. He succeeds Allen J. Lauer, who will remain the chairman of Varian’s board of directors.

In November, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers presented its 2003 Per Bruel Gold Medal for Noise Control and Acoustics to David Feit. A senior research scientist for structural acoustics with the Naval Surface Warfare Center’s Carderock Division in West Bethesda, Maryland, Feit was recognized for “advancing the understanding of structural–acoustic phenomena and subsequent noise and vibration control treatments related to submerged vehicles, high-frequency noise radiation from fluid-loaded structures, and the vibration of fuzzy structures.”

Three individuals recently joined the physics faculty at the University of Texas at Austin. This month, Gennady Shvets began working as an assistant professor. He previously was an associate professor in the department of biological, chemical, and physical sciences at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Ernst-Ludwig Florin and Maxim Tsoi both began their positions as assistant professors this past October. Florin previously was a scientist with the cell biology and biophysics program at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany. Tsoi had been working with the research division at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California.

At a ceremony in Munich in October, the Eduard Rhein Foundation, based in Hamburg, conferred its awards for 2003 to three winners, two of whom do physics-related work. The Cultural Award, with a cash prize of €20 000 (about $23 500), went to Ernst Peter Fischer, a physicist who has been a writer since 1987 and who also routinely teaches the history of science at the University of Konstanz in Germany. He was recognized for his “recent book, Die andere Bildung: Was man von den Naturwissenschaften wissen sollte [The Other Culture: What You Should Know From the Natural Sciences (Ullstein, 2001)]. With this volume, [Fischer] has strongly and positively influenced the ongoing debate in Germany about the appropriate strategies in higher education.” The foundation gave the Technology Award to Paul C. Lauterbur, Center for Advanced Study Professor of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, for “the invention of magnetic resonance imaging as a noninvasive method for cross-sectional imaging at high spatial resolution and with endogenous tissue contrast.” Lauterbur received a cash prize of €50 000 (about $59 000).

This past October, Jack Rowe became the deputy director of the newly formed Institute for Advanced Materials, Nanoscience and Technology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Rowe, also an adjunct professor in the university’s department of physics and astronomy, had been a senior research scientist responsible for special studies in the physical sciences directorate at the Army Research Office in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, since 1996.

Sun Kwok became director of the Taiwan-based Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in September. He had been a professor of astronomy at the University of Calgary in Canada and Killam Fellow of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Clifford V. Johnson joined the physics and astronomy faculty at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles last August as a professor of theoretical physics. He remains a visiting professor at the University of Durham in England, where he had been a professor of applied mathematics.