In Brief

Steven Allan Kivelson will join Stanford University this September as a professor of physics. He currently is a professor of physics at UCLA.

This month in Prague, Czech Republic, four individuals are receiving the 2004 Agilent Technologies Europhysics Prize at the 20th general conference of the European Physical Society’s condensed matter division. Michel Devoret, Daniel Esteve, Hans Mooij, and Yasunobu Nakamura are being recognized for their “realization and demonstration of the quantum bit concept based on superconducting circuits.” Devoret is the director of research of the Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) in Saclay, France, but is now “détaché” at Yale University, where he holds a tenured position as a professor of applied physics and of physics. Esteve is the director of research in the “quantronics” (quantum physics and electronics) group at CEA. Mooij is the director of the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience Delft in the Netherlands. Nakamura is a principal researcher with NEC Fundamental and Environmental Research Laboratories in Tsukuba, Japan.

Michael D. Griffin, who worked for the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, during the 1980s, returned to APL in April to become head of the space department. Formerly president and CEO of In-Q-Tel in Arlington, Virginia, Griffin succeeds Stamatios M. “Tom” Krimigis, who led the department for 13 years.

Nine individuals and eight institutions received the 2003 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring during a ceremony this past May in Washington, DC. Among the winners were the following five who do physics-related work: Denice D. Denton (University of Washington, Seattle), Christine Grant (North Carolina State University), Rudolf Henning (University of South Florida, Tampa), Calvin Mackie (Tulane University), and Lisa Pruitt (University of California, Berkeley).

The American Philosophical Society awarded the 2004 Benjamin Franklin Medal for Distinguished Achievement in the Sciences, the society’s highest honor for scientific research, to Steven Weinberg at a dinner in Philadelphia in April. Weinberg, Regental Professor of Physics and holder of the Jack S. Josey–Welch Foundation Chair in Science at the University of Texas at Austin, was recognized for his role “as a leading architect of the electroweak theory of interactions.” The society acknowledged his “highly regarded textbooks … and his extensive writing on subjects of public interest, such as ballistic missile defense” and added that he is “considered by many to be the preeminent theoretical physicist alive.” In addition to the medal, he received a cash prize of $18 000.

Armen Stepanyants will join the physics department at Northeastern University in September. He currently is a postdoctoral fellow in theoretical neurobiology at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York.

Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, has presented its Michelson Postdoctoral Prize Lectureship this year to Karsten Heeger for his “contributions to the experimental study of neutrinos through his work with the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory and KamLAND [Kamioka Liquid Scintillator Anti-Neutrino Detector] collaborations.” The citation adds that those experiments “have led to the solution of the solar neutrino problem and the observation of neutrino oscillations.” A Chamberlain fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Heeger spent the last week of April in residence at CWRU, where he gave three seminars and a colloquium on the SNO and KamLAND experiments and the future directions of experimental neutrino physics.