Shinn is new AVS president-elect

Neal D. Shinn, a manager at the US Department of Energy Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, is president-elect of AVS, the Science and Technology Society, for 2006. He succeeds Christie Marrian (see Physics Today, March 2005, page 82 ), who is now the society’s president. Shinn will become president in 2007.

In a prepared statement, Shinn said AVS sets itself apart from other scientific societies and must continue to do so by creating and nurturing professional communities for interdisciplinary science and emerging technologies.

“To remain a vibrant society, [we] must stimulate and challenge attendees [in our symposia] … and also be a vehicle for AVS members to establish technical leadership with international impact,” Shinn said in his statement. “AVS is well positioned to champion the opportunities for science and technology to solve global challenges in energy, water and health care.”

The user program manager at the DOE center, a new national user facility jointly operated by Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories, Shinn earned his BS in chemistry and mathematics from the Pennsylvania State University in 1978 and his PhD in chemical physics from MIT in 1983. He was a National Research Council postdoctoral fellow at NIST, where his research involved the elucidation of molecular adsorbate structure and identification of reaction intermediates on metal surfaces using vibrational spectroscopies. He joined Sandia in 1985 as a senior member of the technical staff and led the lab’s research and mission-related programs at the National Synchrotron Light Source.

Shinn is also an adjunct physics professor at Utah State University and serves on external advisory committees for the College of Engineering at Penn State, the biomedical engineering department at the Ohio State University, and the physics department of New Mexico State University. His research interests include using acoustic techniques to understand how molecular structure and ensemble ordering determine the visoelastic mechanical properties of self-assembled molecular monolayers on solid surfaces.

In other AVS election news, Joe Greene (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) remains the society’s clerk/secretary and John Coburn (University of California, Berkeley) retains his position as treasurer. The new AVS directors are Bridget R. Rogers (Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee), Peter Sheldon (National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Golden, Colorado), and Robert A. Langley (retired from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Sandia). The society’s newly elected trustees are Susan B. Sinnott (University of Florida, Gainesville) and Rudolf Ludeke (IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York).