In Brief

At a ceremony next month in Tokyo, the Science and Technology Foundation of Japan will award the 2003 Japan Prize to three individuals. In the science and technology complexity category, the prize will go jointly to Benoit B. Mandelbrot, Sterling Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Yale University, and James A. Yorke, Distinguished University Professor of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Maryland, College Park, for their “creation of universal concepts in complex systems—fractals and chaos.” The prize in the category of visualizing techniques in medicine will go to Seiji Ogawa for his “discovery of the principle for functional magnetic resonance imaging.” Ogawa retired in 2001 as a distinguished member of the technical staff at Lucent Technologies’ Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, but currently is director of Ogawa Laboratories for Brain Function Research at the Hamano Life Science Research Foundation in Tokyo. A cash prize of ¥50 million (about $415 000) will be awarded in each category.

Wendy Freedman became the director of the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California, this month, succeeding Augustus Oemler Jr, who will continue at the observatories as a research staff member. Freedman joined the observatories in 1984 as a postdoctoral fellow and has been a scientific faculty member there since 1987.

In January, Giovanni Bignami became director of the Centre d’Etude Spatiale des Rayonnements (CESR) in Toulouse, France, replacing Dominique LeQueau. Bignami, who is also a professor of astronomy at the University of Pavia in Italy, previously was the science director of the Italian Space Agency (ASI).

John McTague has returned to the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is a professor of materials. From May 2001 until early January of this year, he was the university’s vice president of laboratory management, overseeing Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, and Los Alamos National Laboratories, which are operated by UC for the US Department of Energy and its National Nuclear Security Administration. His successor is UC senior vice president Bruce B. Darling, who has taken the laboratory management post on an interim basis until a permanent replacement is found.

The European Physical Society’s division of nuclear physics awarded the 2002 Lise Meitner Prize for Nuclear Science to James Philip Elliott and Francesco Iachello for their “innovative applications of group theoretical methods to the understanding of atomic nuclei.” Elliott is an emeritus professor of theoretical physics at the University of Sussex in the UK and Iachello is the J. W. Gibbs Professor of Physics and Chemistry at Yale University. The prize is given biannually.

At a ceremony during the 24th International Colloquium for Group Theoretical Methods in Physics held in Paris last July, Harry J. Lipkin received the 2002 Wigner Medal given by the Group Theory and Fundamental Physics Foundation. Lipkin, professor in the particle physics department of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, was recognized for his “contributions to the algebraic method in nuclear and particle physics and its extension to describe the spectra of nuclei.”