In Brief

France A. Córdova, an astrophysicist and vice chancellor for research at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will become chancellor of UC Riverside on 1 July. She replaces Raymond L. Orbach, who was sworn in this past March as the director of the US Department of Energy’s Office of Science (see Physics Today, May 2002, page 26 ). Before coming to UCSB in 1996, Córdova was chief scientist at NASA.

John Iliopoulos will become the first recipient of the Bodossaki Foundation’s Aristeio Bodossaki Prize when it is awarded this month at a ceremony in Athens, Greece. Iliopoulos, director of research with the theoretical physics laboratory at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, is being honored for his “outstanding contributions to the theory of interactions of elementary particles.” The award is accompanied by a cash prize of ά150 000 (about $134 000).

At its annual meeting last month in Penticton, British Columbia, the Canadian Astronomical Society presented the Carlyle S. Beals Award for 2002 to John D. Landstreet, a professor in the physics and astronomy department at the University of Western Ontario. The award is given every two years for outstanding achievement in research to a Canadian astronomer or an astronomer working in Canada. Landstreet’s research focuses on the study of magnetic field structure and surface chemical element distributions and on efforts to detect directly the local line profiles in very sharp-lined A and B stars.

Every three years, the Dutch Mathematical Society chooses an important field in mathematics and, with the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, awards the Brouwer Memorial Medal to an individual in that field. This year’s medal, which recognizes the field of mathematical physics, was presented in April to Michael Aizenman, a professor who holds a joint appointment in the physics and mathematics departments at Princeton University. He was acknowledged as an “outstanding mathematical physicist, who has made many fundamental, far-reaching, powerful, and elegant contributions to the fields of probability, mathematical statistical physics, and field theory.”

Theodor Hänsch and Herbert Walther share this year’s Alfried Krupp Science Prize for Natural Sciences and Engineering, awarded in April by the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach Foundation at a ceremony in Essen, Germany. Hänsch was recognized for his “pioneering scientific achievements in the area of laser spectroscopy and for his basic research, which has paved the way for today’s research.” Walther was acknowledged for his “leading achievements in quantum optics, nuclear physics, and laser physics, which have made possible the significant progress in quantum physics.” Both winners are directors at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching and professors of experimental physics at the University of Munich. The prize carried a purse of ά52 000 (about $46 000) that was split equally between the two winners.