In Brief

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has made two senior management appointments. Jane C. S. Long began her assignment in November as associate director for energy and environment. She had been a professor in the geological sciences department at the University of Nevada, Reno. Cherry A. Murray became deputy director for science and technology at the beginning of this month. She recently retired from Lucent Technologies’ Bell Labs as physical sciences research senior vice president.

On 1 October, Wolfgang M. Heckl took the reins of one of the largest museums of science and technology worldwide, the Deutsches Museum in Munich. The new general director most recently headed an interdisciplinary team in the field of nanoscience at the University of Munich and will continue to do research, at a reduced level, with that team.

Julia King became principal of the faculty of engineering at Imperial College London in September. Formerly chief executive of the Institute of Physics in the UK, she succeeded Frank Leppington, who was acting principal from March to September 2004 and has now retired.

Deborah Jin, a physicist at NIST and an adjoint associate professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, received a 2004 Service to America Medal in science and technology from the Partnership for Public Service at a ceremony in Washington, DC, in September. She was recognized for creating “a new form of matter that researchers hope will help unravel the mysteries of conductivity,” according to the PPS.

The Association for Women in Science, based in Washington, DC, appointed Susan L. Ganter this past July as its new executive director. On leave from her position as an associate professor of mathematical sciences at Clemson University, Ganter, whose prior work includes a research fellowship at NSF and a program directorship with the American Association for Higher Education, succeeds Catherine Didion, who served for 14 years. Didion is now CEO of the new Washington office of the International Network of Women in Science and Engineering, based in Ottawa, Ontario.

Chris G. Van de Walle joined the materials department of the University of California, Santa Barbara, in July as a professor of computational materials. He also will be associated with the California NanoSystems Institute, a multidisciplinary facility jointly operated by UCLA and UCSB. Van de Walle previously was a principal scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center (formerly Xerox PARC) in California.