In Brief

Effective the first of this month, Daniel S. Goldin takes his post as Boston University’s ninth president and succeeds John Silber. NASA’s administrator from April 1992 to November 2001, Goldin most recently was a visiting fellow at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California.

The National Institutes of Health has appointed Jeremy Berg as director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) in Bethesda, Maryland, effective this month. For the past 13 years, Berg directed the department of biophysics and biophysical chemistry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

On 2 September, astrophysicist and astronaut John Mace Grunsfeld took over the reins of the NASA science program as chief scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC. A veteran of four space shuttle flights, including two missions to service the Hubble Space Telescope, Grunsfeld says that he is joining the agency “at a time when the space science, Earth science, and biological and physical science enterprises are providing a wealth of scientific data and discoveries.” He adds that, as part of his new duties, he will “confront the ensuing debate about the relative merits of robotic spacecraft and human exploration.” He replaces Shannon Lucid, who has returned to NASA’s Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston, Texas.

The Physical Society of Berlin presented its 2003 Karl Scheel Prize to Francesca Moresco for her research on single molecules using scanning tunneling microscopy. Moresco, scientific assistant at the Free University of Berlin’s Institute for Experimental Physics, received a medal and a ₠5000 cash award (about $5700) at a ceremony held in Berlin, Germany, last spring.

In May, J. Lawrence Katz joined the University of Missouri-Kansas City as the Distinguished Research Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Oral Biology. He was a professor of biomedical engineering at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.

In September, Thomas George became the chancellor of the University of Missouri-St. Louis. George, who has a doctorate in theoretical chemistry, had spent the previous six years as the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.

Robert Hwang, formerly manager of the thin film and interface science department at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California, joined Brookhaven National Laboratory last spring as director of the Center for Functional Nanomaterials.