In Brief

The 2003 Willis E. Lamb Medal for Laser Science and Quantum Optics was awarded to Leon Cohen, Michael S. Feld, and Herschel Rabitz at the Winter Conference of Quantum Electronics, held in Snowbird, Utah. Cohen, a professor in Hunter College’s physics and astronomy department, was recognized for “pioneering work on quantum quasi-probability distributions and the closely related applied field of time-frequency analysis.” Feld was cited for “the first experimental demonstrations of super-radiance and the microlaser and for pioneering applications of optics to biological physics.” He is a professor of physics and director of the George R. Harrison Spectroscopy Laboratory at MIT. Rabitz, a professor of chemistry at Princeton University, was acknowledged for “inventing the learning algorithm approach to the coherent control of quantum phenomena with important and wide-ranging applications.”

In March, Mark Cardillo became the executive director of the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation in New York City. He previously was the director of broadband access research at Lucent Technologies’ Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey.

During a ceremony in March in Washington, DC, 10 individuals and 6 institutions received a 2002 Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics, Science, and Engineering Mentoring. Included among the awardees were four individuals who work in physics-related fields: Enrique Barrera (Rice University), Steven Greenbaum (Hunter College), Chung-Chiun Liu (Case Western Reserve University), and Martha Mecartney (University of California, Irvine). The award recognizes people and institutions that have provided opportunities for participation by women, minorities, and disabled persons in science, mathematics, and engineering at the elementary, secondary, undergraduate, and graduate education levels.

Last February, at a ceremony in Trieste, Italy, Robert Szipöcs received the 2003 ICO/ICTP Award for his “outstanding contributions in the theory and design of chirped mirrors” he developed those mirrors for femtosecond pulsed laser systems. He is a research fellow and head of the laboratory for ultrafast lasers and spectroscopy at the Research Institute for Solid State Physics and Optics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. The award, given jointly by the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics and the International Commission for Optics, recognizes a researcher aged 40 or younger who has made contributions to the field of optics in a developing country.

Chuan Sheng Liu began a three-year term this past February as president of the National Central University in Taiwan. He is on temporary leave from his position as a professor of physics at the University of Maryland, College Park. Liu, who had directed University of Maryland’s Institute of Global Chinese Affairs, has relinquished that post to interim director Julia Chang Bloch, who is also an ambassador-in-residence at the institute.

In January, Robert Wolkow became the iCORE Chair in Nanoscale Information and Communications Technology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and the molecular scale devices group leader at the Canadian National Research Council’s new National Institute for Nanotechnology, located on the same campus. Wolkow previously led the scanning tunneling microscopy group at the NRC’s Steacie Institute for Molecular Sciences in Ottawa, Ontario.

COSPAR, the International Council for Science’s Committee on Space Research, in Paris, has bestowed its top honor, the 2002 Space Science Award, on Stamatios M. Krimigis and Christopher T. Russell. Krimigis, head of the space department at the Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, was cited for his “distinguished career as a space plasma physicist, with seminal contributions in solar and interplanetary physics, Earth and planetary magnetospheres, and space science instrumentation.” Russell, according to the citation, is “well recognized scientifically for his seminal contributions to understandings of plasma waves in the Earth’s and other planets’ magnetospheres, for his contributions to new observational understandings in magnetic field reconnection, for his insightful observational studies of solar wind-magnetosphere coupling, and for many additional contributions over a wide range of space plasma subjects….” He holds joint appointments in the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at UCLA and in the university’s Earth and space sciences department.

Andrea Bertozzi, professor of mathematics and physics at Duke University, will join the UCLA faculty in July as professor of mathematics.