In Brief

In July, the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in Nice, France, announced the winner of its 2002 Medaille de l’ADION (Medal of the Association for the International Development of the Observatory of Nice). Margaret J. Geller, senior scientist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is being recognized for her “eminent contributions to the study of the structure and evolution of systems of galaxies.” She will receive the medal during a ceremony to be held in Nice next spring.

In August, Maxim Marchevsky, previously a postdoctoral researcher at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, joined the physics faculty at Syracuse University as an assistant professor of physics.

The UK’s Royal Astronomical Society presented three medals in 2002. Leon Mestel received the Gold Medal in Astronomy for his work on a variety of stellar and galactic problems, especially ones involving magnetic fields. He is an emeritus professor of theoretical astrophysics at the University of Sussex. The RAS presented its Gold Medal in Geophysics to John Arthur Jacobs, who retired as a professor of geophysics from the University of Cambridge in 1983. The society noted that he is “probably best known for his work on the Earth’s core and the properties and dynamics of the Earth’s magnetic field.” Douglas Gough, director of the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge, received the Eddington Medal. The citation notes that his “achievements in clarifying the properties of stars and stellar oscillations make him an eminently appropriate recipient.”

After 21 years at AlliedSignal (now Honeywell International) in Morristown, New Jersey, most recently as a senior principal scientist, Sanjeeva Murthy joined the University of Vermont last month as an associate professor of physics.

At its annual meeting this month in Salt Lake City, Utah, the Society of Exploration Geophysicists, headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma, will be presenting the Maurice Ewing Medal—the society’s highest award—to Gordon F. West. The society is honoring West, emeritus professor in the University of Toronto’s physics department and a consultant to several mineral exploration companies, for his “important contributions to the science of geophysics, both personally and through his supervision of generations of graduate and undergraduate students.” West codeveloped, with Yves Lamontagne, the University of Toronto electromagnetic method, which “has been credited for the discovery of several important base-metal deposits,” and that he coauthored, with Fraser Grant, the textbook Interpretation Theory in Applied Geophysics (McGraw-Hill, 1965), which “has been used to teach thousands of geophysics students over the past 37 years.”

In July, Alan E. Waltar became the director of nuclear energy at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington. He retired in June from Texas A&M University as head of the nuclear engineering department, a position he had held since 1998.

Leo P. Kouwenhoven and Ullrich Steiner shared this year’s Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences, which carried a cash award of $50 000. The prize’s subfield for 2002 was engineered materials. Tel Aviv University, which presented the award last May, recognized Kouwenhoven for his “seminal contributions to our understanding of electronic states and charge transport in submicron systems.” He is a professor of physics in the department of nanoscience at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. TAU acknowledged Steiner for “innovative discoveries in the analysis and control of the structure and shape of thin polymeric films at the submicron scale.” He is a professor of polymer chemistry at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and is also affiliated with the university’s Materials Science Center.