In Brief

David A. King, deputy director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, since last November, took the post of director on 15 June. He succeeds Art Stephenson, who was named director in September 1998. Stephenson plans to continue at NASA as a special assistant to the associate administrator for education.

The Association of Korean Physicists in America presented its 2003 Outstanding Young Researcher Award to Hwang Lee at AKPA’s general meeting in Austin, Texas, this past March. Lee, research scientist at the senior level at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, was acknowledged for his “outstanding contributions in the field of nonlinear and linear optics.”

This month at the triennial International Congress on Mathematical Physics in Lisbon, Portugal, three individuals are each receiving the Henri Poincaré Prize. They are Huzihiro Araki, who retired in 1996 as the director of Kyoto University’s Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences; Elliott H. Lieb, Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics and professor of mathematics at Princeton University; and Oded Schramm, senior researcher with Microsoft Corp in Redmond, Washington. The award, given by the International Association of Mathematics, recognizes outstanding contributions in mathematical physics and those that lay the ground for novel developments in the field.

On 11 July, Brian J. Boyle will join the Australia Telescope National Facility, a division of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, as its new director. For the past seven years, he has directed the Anglo-Australian Observatory in Epping, New South Wales. He succeeds Ronald D. Ekers, who became the ATNF’s first director in 1988, and Raymond P. Norris, who has been the acting director for much of the past two years. Ekers plans to pursue research as an Australian Federation fellow and, beginning next month, will be president of the International Astronomical Union. Norris will serve as the ATNF’s deputy director and will be directing the astronomy part of the Australian government’s Major National Research Facilities program.

Marlan O. Scully received the 2003 Quantum Electronics Award at the 23rd Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics and the 11th Quantum Electronics and Laser Science Conference last month in Baltimore, Maryland. The Lasers and Electro-Optics Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers cited Scully, professor of physics and electrical engineering at Texas A&M University and a professor of chemistry at Princeton University, for his “field-opening contributions to the foundation of laser physics.” Scully also received a $4000 honorarium.