NAS honors contributors to science

Professors, researchers, and businessmen are among recipients of awards distributed by the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of outstanding scientific achievement. The organization is handing out the honors during its 143rd annual meeting this month in Washington, DC. Of the 15 receiving awards, 4 are involved in physics-related work.

The academy’s most prestigious honor, its Public Welfare Medal, goes this year to Norman R. Augustine, retired chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin Corp in Bethesda, Maryland, and head of the influential National Academies panel that authored the 2005 report “Rising Above the Gathering Storm,” which warned of the growing need for the US to invest in science education and research. Augustine is receiving the honor “for contributions to the vitality of science in the United States by bringing to industry and government a better understanding of the crucial role that fundamental scientific research must play in our long-term security and economic prosperity.”

David Goldhaber-Gordon, deputy director of the NSF-Stanford-IBM Center for Probing the Nanoscale in Stanford, California, and assistant professor of physics at Stanford University, is this year’s recipient of the NAS Award for Initiatives in Research “for his fundamental studies of electron correlations in mesoscopic structures.” The award is accompanied by $15 000.

Klaus Keil, interim dean at the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, is the recipient of the J. Lawrence Smith Medal “for his pioneering quantitative studies of minerals in meteorites and important contributions to understanding the nature, origin, and evolution of their parent bodies.” He receives a medal and prize of $25 000.

The Mary Clark Thompson Medal is being handed out to Steven M. Stanley, a research professor in the geology and geophysics department at the University of Hawaii, “for research and leadership in bivalve functional morphology and the macroevolution of disparate animals, including hominids, in the context of Earth’s physical and chemical history.” He receives a medal and a prize of $15 000.