In Brief

Effective 1 January, Bertil Andersson began serving a five-year appointment as chief executive of the European Science Foundation, based in Strasbourg, France. Andersson was president of Linköping University and a professor of biochemistry at Stockholm University. He succeeded ESF Secretary General Enric Banda, who plans to return to Barcelona, Spain, to take his post as a research professor with the CSIC, an autonomus, multidisciplinary public research body affiliated with the Ministry of Science and Technology.

Art McDonald, a subatomic physicist from Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, and director of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, received the 2003 Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering in November at a gala dinner held in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council awarded the medal, NSERC’s highest honor, to McDonald in honor of his contributions to science, particularly his leadership of SNO. The council promises to fund McDonald’s research to the tune of Can$1 million (about $780 000) over 5 years. McDonald has announced that, in honor of his student André Hamer, who died in February 2003 (see Physics Today, November 2003, page 88 ), part of the award will support prizes for the top NSERC postgraduate scholarship winners.

Madeleine Jacobs took her new post as the executive director and CEO of the American Chemical Society on 1 January. She succeeded John K. Crum, who retired after 20 years in that position. Jacobs previously was the editor-in-chief of the weekly Chemical & Engineering News. Her successor is Rudy M. Baum, who had served as the magazine’s deputy editor-in-chief.

Heino Finkelmann and Mark Warner are the winners of the 2003 Agilent Technologies Europhysics Prize, awarded by the European Physical Society and funded by the Palo Alto, California-based Agilent Technologies. The scientists were cited for their “discovery of new phases of polymer liquid crystal elastomers and the experimental and theoretical studies of their extraordinary properties.” Finkelmann is a professor in the Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry at the University of Freiburg in Germany. Warner is a professor of theoretical physics in the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, UK.

Louis F. DiMauro, senior scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, will join the faculty of Ohio State University this summer as the Edward E. and Sylvia Hagenlocker Chair in Physics.

During a ceremony in November in Rome, the European Commission presented the 2003 Descartes Prize to two teams of researchers. The first team, led by Richard Friend, Cavendish Professor of Physics at the University of Cambridge in the UK, won, in part, for having “achieved breakthroughs in light and image display screens, paving the way for a new range of innovative applications such as pliable TV and computer screens and switch-on wallpaper.” The team split its €700 000 (about $890 000) share of the prize. Veronique Dehant, head of the time, Earth rotation, and space geodesy section at the Royal Observatory of Belgium in Brussels, led the second team. Its project “breaks new ground in overcoming the difficulties caused by variations in the Earth’s rotation axis,” says the citation, “with a new model which improves the accuracy of global positioning and navigation systems from 2 meters to within only 2–3 centimeters.” The team shared the €300 000 (about $380 000) prize.

In October, Stuart MacCormack became the product engineering manager for high-power fiber lasers at Spectra-Physics in Mountain View, California. He had been a staff scientist at JDS Uniphase in San Jose. Also joining Spectra-Physics that month was Jim Harrison, now director of engineering for the diode lasers group, which is based in Tucson, Arizona. He was previously the vice president of engineering for the semiconductor laser group at Coherent in Santa Clara, California.

Astronomer Steve B. Howell started working last summer at the WIYN Observatory and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona. He previously had been with the University of California, Riverside, as a senior research scientist.