In Brief

Persis Drell and spouse Jim Welch both joined SLAC this spring. Drell is the associate director of SLAC’s research division and Welch is an accelerator physicist. Both previously worked at Cornell University’s laboratory of nuclear studies. She was the deputy director of the lab and he was a senior research associate.

Robert Callender will become the editor of Biophysical Journal on 1 July, succeeding Peter Moore, who has been editor since 1997. Callender, a professor of biochemistry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, located in New York, will serve until 2007.

Earlier this year, Jacqueline N. Hewitt became the director of the Center for Space Research at MIT. She succeeds Claude R. Canizares, who is now an associate provost at MIT.

Herwig Kogelnik and Allan Snyder have jointly won the 2001 Marconi International Fellowship Award, presented in December by the Marconi Foundation. According to the foundation, the pair’s “pioneering contributions to optical communications based both on a masterful command of the mathematical basis as well as an extraordinarily powerful physical insight represent a unique and multifaceted achievement.” Kogelnik is the adjunct photonics systems research vice president at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies. Snyder is the director of the Centre for the Mind, a joint venture of the Australian National University and the University of Sydney. He also holds the Peter Karmel Chair of Science and the Mind at ANU and the 150th Anniversary Chair of Science and the Mind at Sydney. The winners shared the $100 000 cash prize.

Andrew Millis joined the physics faculty at Columbia University in January. He had been a professor in the Rutgers University physics department and a member of the Center for Materials Theory at Rutgers.

At its annual meeting this November in Somerset, New Jersey, the Eastern Analytical Symposium will present the 2002 EAS awards to seven individuals, two of whom conduct physics-related work. The EAS Award for Achievements in Magnetic Resonance will be given to Aksel A. Bothner-By, an emeritus professor in the chemistry department at Carnegie Mellon University. Jerome J. Workman Jr, a senior research fellow at the Kimberly-Clark Corp in Neenah, Wisconsin, will receive the EAS Award for Achievements in Near-Infrared Spectroscopy.

In Munich, Germany, last fall, the Hamburg-based Eduard Rhein Foundation presented its awards for 2001, including one for physics-related work. David N. Payne received the Basic Research Award for “the invention of the erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA), which enabled the revolution of the global telecommunication networks during the past decade,” according to the citation. Payne is the director of the Optoelectronics Research Centre at the University of Southampton in the UK and also the chairman and director of Southampton Photonics Inc.

Meg Urry has joined the Yale University faculty as a professor of physics and as director of the new Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics. She previously was head of the science program selection office at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.

Stanislas Leibler is the head of the Laboratory of Living Matter at Rockefeller University in New York City. He previously was a professor of physics and molecular biology at Princeton University.