In Brief

Leon Radziemski joined the Research Corp in Tucson, Arizona, last May as its new program officer. Among his duties, he will be the liaison between the American Physical Society and the company, which funds two APS awards and also funds physics faculty research. Radziemski previously served for 12 years as dean of the College of Sciences at Washington State University.

After 29 years as editor of Astrophysical Journal Letters, Alexan der Dalgarno, Phillips Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University and senior scientist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is retiring from the position. He will be succeeded by Christopher Sneden, the Rex G. Baker Jr Centennial Research Professor in Astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin. The transition will take place this fall.

Walter L. Brown, who spent more than 50 years with Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, and its recent spinoff, Agere Systems, retired from Agere. On 1 June, he joined Lehigh University’s material science and engineering faculty as an adjunct professor. He had been the associate director of materials research at Agere.

The National Academy of Engineering presented its Charles Stark Draper Prize in February to Robert Langer, Kenneth J. Germeshausen Professor of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering at MIT. The academy acknowledged Langer as “a pioneer in applying engineering principles to medical problems. … His creative engineering of polymer plastics is now allowing delivery of medicine in unique ways to difficult locations in the body.” The prize came with a purse of $500 000.

In March, the UK’s Institute of Physics announced the appointment of Julia King as its next chief executive. Currently the director of marine engineering and technology at Rolls-Royce in Derby, King will succeed Alun Jones in September.

Bruce Berne, Higgins Professor of Chemistry at Columbia University, received the 2002 Joel Henry Hildebrand Award in the Theoretical and Experimental Chemistry of Liquids in April at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society. He was acknowledged for his “pioneering contributions to the theory of dynamic processes in liquids, processes such as chemical reaction, vibrational relaxation, and quantum solvation; and for the first molecular dynamics simulation of a molecular fluid.” The award consisted of $5000 and a certificate.

At the 7th International Conference on the Structure of Surfaces, to be held this month in Newcastle, Australia, the Surface Structure Prize will be presented jointly to Donald W. Jepsen, Franco Jona, and P. M. Marcus for their “pioneering contributions to the development of quantitative low-energy electron diffraction (LEED) for the determination of the atomic structure of crystal surfaces.” Marcus is an emeritus staff member at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. Jona is a leading professor in the materials science and engineering department at SUNY Stony Brook. Jepsen is retired from his position as a research staff member at the T. J. Watson Research Center.

Franco Porcelli, professor of plasma physics at the Politecnico di Torino in Italy, became the editor of Physics Letters A in January, succeeding Miklos Porkolab.

In February, in a ceremony at the Royal Society of Medicine in London, the Rank Prize Funds awarded several Rank Prizes for Opto-electronics. Brian Garside (Opto-Electronics Inc), Kenneth O. Hill (Zenastra Photonics Inc), Gerald Meltz (OFT Associates), and William W. Morey (Sabeus Photonics Inc) jointly received a prize for “the invention and development of fiber Bragg gratings.” The four winners shared the cash prize of £40 000 (about $58 000). A prize for “the invention and application of optical coherence tomography” went to James G. Fujimoto (MIT), Carmen A. Puliafito (Bascom Palmer Eye Institute, University of Miami School of Medicine), and Eric A. Swanson (LightLab Imaging and also Sycamore Networks Inc). Fujimoto received £20 000 (about $29 000), and Puliafito and Swanson each received £10 000 (close to $14 500). A prize went to Robert D. Burnham of Estes Park, Colorado, Kenichi Iga (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science), and Donald R. Scifres (JDS Uniphase Corp) for “the invention of verticalcavity surface-emitting lasers.” The winners each received £12 500 (approximately $18 000).

The State Preeminent Science and Technology Award for 2001, China’s highest award for achievement in science, went to two recipients, one of them solid-state physicist Huang Kun. The citation noted that, “for the last half century, [Kun] has been not only making important contributions to solid-state physics, but at the same time making contributions to the teaching of general physics, solid-state physics, and semiconductor physics in colleges and universities.” He is a physicist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and honorary director of the academy’s institute of semiconductors. Accompanying the prize was a cash award of 5 million yuan (about $605 000).

Martin C. E. Huber, visiting scientist at the International Space Science Institute in Bern, Switzerland, will become the next president of the European Physical Society. He starts his term in March 2003, succeeding Martial Ducloy.

In April, Joanna S. Fowler, senior chemist and director of the PET (positron emission tomography) program at Brookhaven National Laboratory, received the 2002 Glenn T. Seaborg Award for Nuclear Chemistry from the American Chemical Society. Fowler was recognized for her “pioneering contributions to positron emission tomography including the development of fluorine-18-fluoro-deoxyglucose, a radiotracer used worldwide for measuring brain function and for diagnosing cancer, and for the development of radiotracers for imaging monoamine oxidase, an enzyme found to be reduced in the brains of smokers.” She received a cash prize of $3000.