In Brief

This month, Robert Birgeneau joined the University of California, Berkeley, as its ninth chancellor, succeeding Robert Berdahl, who will return to the Berkeley faculty after a year-long sabbatical. Birgeneau comes to Berkeley from the University of Toronto, where he had served four years as president.

In July, J. Anthony Tyson became a member of the University of California, Davis, physics faculty as a distinguished professor. He is also now the director of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope project, in which the university is a partner. Tyson previously was affiliated with Lucent Technologies’ Bell Labs as a distinguished member of the technical staff.

Michael F. Thorpe has joined Arizona State University in Tempe as Foundation Professor to set up a new group in biophysics theory. He holds joint appointments in the departments of physics and astronomy and of chemistry and biochemistry, and in the Arizona Biodesign Institute. He previously was a university distinguished professor in the physics and astronomy department at Michigan State University in East Lansing.

Pierre Hohenberg became New York University’s senior vice provost for research this past May. Hohenberg relocated to NYU from Yale University, where he was the Eugene Higgins Adjunct Professor of Physics and Applied Physics and had served as Yale’s deputy provost for science and technology from 1995 to 2003.

Maw-Kuen Wu, former director of the Institute of Physics, Academia Sinica, in Taipei, Taiwan, was appointed in May as minister of the National Science Council of Taiwan.

Gary Sanders joined the Thirty Meter Telescope project in April as its project manager. The TMT is a collaboration of the Association of Canadian Universities for Research in Astronomy, the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Caltech, and the University of California. Sanders had been the project manager and deputy director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory.

The Welch Foundation is bestowing this year’s Welch Award in Chemistry on Allen Bard, Norman Hackerman–Welch Regents Chair in Chemistry at the University of Texas at Austin. Bard is being acknowledged for his “lifetime achievements in basic electrochemistry research. His work has led to such applications as self-cleaning glass, photocell production of computer memory and the use of light to decompose pollutants.” The citation adds that Bard is “responsible for such inventions as the scanning electrochemical microscope, which has improved scientists’ ability to study surface structures and measure reaction rates.” The award, scheduled to be presented this month at the foundation’s conference in Houston, Texas, includes a cash prize of $300 000.

The physics department at the Pennsylvania State University welcomed three former research associates from other institutions as new faculty members this fall. Deirdre Shoemaker, previously at Cornell University, Dezhe Jin, from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at MIT, and Kenneth M. O’Hara, from NIST in Gaithersburg, Maryland, are the new assistant professors.

Syracuse University recently hired three new assistant professors in physics. Joining the department in August were Christian Armendáriz Picón, who completed a postdoc at the Enrico Fermi Institute and in the department of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago, and Liviu Movileanu, who was a postdoc in the department of medical biochemistry and genetics at Texas A&M University. Starting in January 2005 is Britton Plourde, currently a postdoc in the physics department at the University of California, Berkeley.

The astronomy department of the University of Texas at Austin has announced two new hires: Shardha Jogee, who joined the faculty in August as an assistant professor, and Volker Bromm, who will take his post as assistant professor next month. Both come to UT from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, where Jogee was an astronomer and Bromm is an Institute Fellow.

Tel Aviv University awarded this year’s Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences jointly to Andrea M. Ghez and Adam G. Riess at a ceremony this past May. Ghez, professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA, was recognized for her “pioneering high-resolution infrared observations that provide evidence for, and establish the mass of, the supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy.” Riess, an astronomer with the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, and an adjunct associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, was acknowledged for his “contributions to the observational study of distant Type Ia supernovae that reveal the accelerating expansion of the universe, and the possible existence of dark energy.” The pair share the accompanying $40 000 purse.