In Brief

Last month, Harold Kroto, who won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, joined the chemistry faculty of Florida State University in Tallahassee as a Francis Eppes Professor. He comes to FSU from the University of Sussex in the UK.

The French Academy of Sciences bestows its highest honor, the Grande Médaille d’Or, in Paris this month on David Gross, director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and one of this year’s physics Nobel laureates (see the story next month). The academy is recognizing his contributions to quantum field theory and particle physics and notes, in particular, his role in the establishment of quantum chromodynamics. The citation adds that Gross has also made “essential contributions to superstring theory.”

On 1 September, William Trischuk, professor of physics at the University of Toronto, became the new director of the Canadian Institute of Particle Physics, where his term is slated to end in June 2009. He succeeded Richard K. Keeler, who resigned this past August to join the University of Victoria as its associate vice president of research.

To help launch its new research program in modern cosmology, the University of California, Irvine, has hired four new assistant professors in its department of physics and astronomy. Manoj Kaplinghat arrived in July from the University of California, Davis. Elizabeth Barton, who was at the University of Arizona, Tucson, and James Bullock, who was at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, came on board in September. Asantha Cooray of Caltech will join UCI in January 2005.