In Brief

Jack Wilson, who had been serving as the interim president of the University of Massachusetts since last August, was named president of the system in March. He is a past chair of the American Physical Society’s forum on education, was an executive officer with the American Association of Physics Teachers, and was on the governing board of the American Institute of Physics. Wilson was instrumental in AIP’s move from New York to College Park, Maryland, and made the preliminary political and legal arrangements for the creation of a tax-exempt American Center for Physics.

Next month, Viola Vogel and her research group will move to ETH Zürich to establish a new institute for biologically oriented materials. There, researchers will study the engineering principles of biological nanosystems to inspire new technologies, from tissue engineering to biomedical therapies. Vogel is a professor in the department of bioengineering and an adjunct professor in the physics department at the University of Washington, Seattle.

Michael Atiyah and Isadore M. Singer jointly received the Abel Prize for 2004 from the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters at a ceremony last month at the University Aula in Oslo, Norway. This is only the second time this international mathematics prize has been given. The pair were honored for their “discovery and proof of the index theorem, bringing together topology, geometry, and analysis, and their outstanding role in building new bridges between mathematics and theoretical physics.” Atiyah, who retired in 1997 as master of Trinity College, University of Cambridge, is an honorary professor in the School of Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh. Singer is an Institute Professor in the mathematics department at MIT. The two shared the cash prize of 6 million kroners (about $861 000).

After 20 years as editor of the Astronomical Journal, Paul Hodge, professor of astronomy at the University of Washington, Seattle, is leaving that post to spend more time on research. His successor will be John S. Gallagher III, professor of astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The transition of editorial offices from Seattle to Madison will be finalized by the time Hodge’s term as editor is completed in December 2004.

Next month, Douglas Durian and Andrea Liu will join the University of Pennsylvania as professors in the department of physics and astronomy. Currently at UCLA, Durian is a professor of physics and Liu is a professor in UCLA’s department of chemistry and biochemistry.

Pallab Bhattacharya, James R. Mellor Professor of Engineering and a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, joined the staff of the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics on 1 January 2004 as the publication’s editor-in-chief. He succeeds outgoing editor Allister Ferguson, who had held the position since January 1998. Ferguson is a professor of photonics at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland.

The American Mathematical Society and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics awarded the 2004 Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics to James Sethian at the joint AMS-SIAM meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, in January. Sethian, professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, was honored for his “seminal work on the computer representation of the motion of curves, surfaces, interfaces, and wavefronts, and for his brilliant applications of mathematical and computational ideas to problems in science and engineering.”

Susan Ginsberg joined the US Department of Homeland Security in December as the senior policy adviser to the science and technology directorate. Ginsberg, who has a background in materials science and planetary studies, had previously been a senior science-policy fellow in the American Physical Society’s office of public affairs.