In Brief

Plasma physicist Chuang Ren started a new job this month as assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Rochester in New York. He left UCLA, where he was an assistant research engineer.

Tony Beasley has left a position in California to take a new one, starting this month, in Santiago, Chile, as the international project manager for the Atacama Large Millimeter Array project. He had been the project manager for the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy, which is situated at Caltech’s Owens Valley Radio Observatory in Big Pine.

At the 25th International Colloquium on Group Theoretical Methods in Physics (ICGTMP) last month in Cocoyoc, Mexico, Erdal Ýnönü received the Group Theory and Fundamental Physics Foundation’s Wigner Medal for “conceiving with [Eugene] Wigner a notion of group contraction and deriving with it the representations up to a factor of the Galilei group from the Poincaré group.” Ýnönü did that work during the early 1950s, when he was a visiting fellow at Princeton University. He then returned to Turkey, where he worked on applications of group theory, reactor theory, and neutron-transport theory and developed the department of theoretical physics at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara. Later, he entered politics as president of the Social Democratic People’s Party of Turkey and also served as the country’s deputy prime minister and minister of foreign affairs. In 1996, Ýnönü joined the Feza Gürsey Institute in Istanbul, Turkey, where he is a senior research fellow. He also delivers lectures part-time on the history of science at Sabancý University in Istanbul.

Also awarded at the ICGTMP was the 2004 Hermann Weyl Prize, presented by the colloquium’s standing committee to Nikita Nekrasov of the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in Bures-sur-Yvette, France. Nekrasov, IHÉS permanent professor, was recognized for his “fundamental results in the theory of integrable systems, supersymmetric gauge theories and dual string theories; in particular, for the discovery of non-commutative instantons, for introducing the ‘Nekrasov partition function’ and applying it to the N = 2 Seiberg–Witten theory.”

The new vice chancellor for research at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will be Fermilab Director Michael S. Witherell. He will continue at Fermilab through 30 June 2005 and, on 1 July 2005, will take up his new post at UCSB, where he will also serve on the physics faculty. He succeeds physicist France A. Córdova, who became the new chancellor of the University of California, Riverside, on 1 July 2002. Witherell first joined the Santa Barbara faculty in 1981, but left in 1999 to head Fermilab. Córdova was chief scientist at NASA during the mid-1990s.

Jonathan P. Dowling joined Louisiana State University last month as a Horace C. Hearne Professor of Theoretical Physics to begin a new quantum sciences and technology group, which will be an inaugural member of the university’s Hearne Institute for Theoretical Physics. He previously was principal scientist of the quantum computing technologies group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

For the first time since its founding in 1971, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, located about 140 kilometers south of Seoul, has a foreigner at the helm. In July, Nobel laureate Robert B. Laughlin was inaugurated as KAIST’s 12th president. Earlier this year, Laughlin, also a professor of physics at Stanford University, was appointed president of the Asia Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics in P’ohang, Korea; he will continue in that post.