NAS Honors Achievements

Fourteen individuals received awards from the National Academy of Sciences at a ceremony held in Washington, DC, in April. The winners included the following six, who work in the physical sciences.

NAS presented the Arctowski Medal, awarded every three years, to Roger K. Ulrich, a professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA. He was acknowledged for “recognizing the solar five-minute oscillations as acoustic modes in the solar interior and systematically developing both the theory and the observations to establish today’s precise standard model of the solar interior.” He received a medal and a cash prize of $20 000, plus $60 000 to go to an institution of his choice.

Wallace S. Broecker, Newberry Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, won the Arthur L. Day Prize and Lectureship, which is awarded every three years and comes with a cash prize of $20 000. He was recognized for his “uniquely evocative, creative voice that has fundamentally changed the way we think about the role of oceans in the climate system.”

The NAS Award in Applied Mathematics and Numerical Analysis, given every three years, went to Heinz-Otto Kreiss for his “seminal contribution to the understanding of differential and difference equations and for his many outstanding contributions to numerical analysis, fluid dynamics, and meteorology.” A professor of mathematics at UCLA, he received a cash award of $10 000.

The NAS Award for Initiatives in Research was bestowed on Deborah S. Jin, a physicist with NIST in Boulder, Colorado, for her “experimental realization and characterization of a new quantum system, the vapor-phase degenerate Fermi gas.” She received a cash prize of $15 000 with this award, which is presented annually.

Daniel Kleppner will deliver the Robertson Memorial Lecture, which is given every three years to a scientist who is invited to lecture on his or her work and its international implications. The Lester Wolfe Professor of Physics at MIT, Kleppner was acknowledged for his “leadership in merging the research fields of atomic physics, quantum degenerate systems, and low-temperature physics.” The award carries a cash prize of $10 000.

NAS presented the G. K. Warren Prize to Gary Parker for “rigorous analysis based on fundamental physical principles and laboratory experiments markedly advancing our understanding of sediment transport, river morphology, and channel behavior.” An Institute of Technology Distinguished Professor in the civil engineering department at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Parker received a $10 000 cash prize with the award, which is given every four years.