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Volume 6, Issue 44
Feb 16, 2007
Circulation: 18,120
Editor: Beth Keithly

Friday FYI

Newsletter from the The Office of Global Strategies and International Relations - U. T. Dallas

University News

National Academy of Engineering Elects 64 Members and Nine Foreign Associates

The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) has elected 64 new members and nine foreign associates, NAE President Wm. A. Wulf announced today. This brings the total U.S. membership to 2,217 and the number of foreign associates to 188.

Election to the National Academy of Engineering is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer.

Academy membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to "engineering research, practice, or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineering literature," and to the "pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education."

A list of newly elected members and foreign associates follows, with their primary affiliations at the time of election and a brief statement of their principal engineering accomplishments.

New Members

New Foreign Associates

[ FYI Index ]

Secretary of Energy Announces Eight E.O. Lawrence Award Winners

Last week, Secretary of Energy Samuel W. Bodman named eight winners of the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award. The Lawrence Award honors scientists and engineers at mid-career for exceptional contributions in research and development that support the Department of Energy and its mission to advance the national, economic and energy security of the United States. The award consists of a gold medal, a citation and an honorarium of $50,000.

The Lawrence Award was established in 1959 to honor the memory of the late Dr. Lawrence who invented the cyclotron (a particle accelerator) and after whom two major Energy Department laboratories at Berkeley and Livermore, California, are named. The Lawrence Awards, given in seven categories, will be presented at a ceremony in Washington, D.C.

The winners are: Paul Alivisatos, University of California at Berkeley and E.O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Moungi Bawendi, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, jointly, for the Materials Research category (the winners of this joint award will share the honorarium); Malcolm J. Andrews, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico, for the National Security category; Arup K. Chakraborty, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for the Life Sciences category; My Hang V. Huynh, Los Alamos National Laboratory, for the Chemistry category; Marc Kamionkowski, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, for the Physics category; John Zachara, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, Washington, for the Environmental Science and Technology category; and, Steven Zinkle, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for the Nuclear Technology category.

Paul Alivisatos and Moungi Bawendi share the award in the Materials Research category "For chemical synthesis and characterization of functional semiconducting nanocrystals, also known as quantum dots." Professor Alivisatos, a nanomaterials chemist, has demonstrated that advanced properties of solid state electronic materials can be duplicated in colloidal nanocrystals produced by simple and accessible synthetic chemistry approaches. His work culminated in a seminal paper in the development of the field of nanocrystals. Professor Bawendi, a materials chemist, developed a synthesis of semiconductor nanocrystals that was the first to enable precise control of their size and precise determination of their properties. Using the Bawendi synthesis, nanocrystals are now routinely made-to-order.

Malcolm Andrews, a mechanical engineer and mathematician, is a world-renowned expert on Rayleigh-Taylor mixing and unstable or turbulent fluid flow processes that are critical to the quality of predictions of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile reliability and thus to the nation's security. He has developed a world-class laboratory at Texas A&M University for buoyancy-driven mixing research and is one of the leading individuals in obtaining closure between theory, computation and experiment in this field.

Arup K. Chakraborty, a chemical engineer, has applied statistical mechanical methods to shed light on the molecular mechanisms that regulate the activation of T lymphocytes that orchestrate the immune response. His ground-breaking theoretical work has had widespread impact on experimental cellular and molecular immunology.

My Hang V. Huynh, a chemist, is the pioneer for the groundbreaking discovery of Green Primary Explosives to replace mercury and lead primary explosives which have caused detrimental effects on the environment and humans for nearly 400 years. Her interdisciplinary research has led to the formation of a new series of high-nitrogen transition metal complexes which are perfect precursors for preparing metallic nanofoams. She also designs and synthesizes a unique class of organic polyazido compounds containing no carbon-carbon bonds that transcend the carbon-carbon paradigm. These organic compounds are the ideal feedstocks for carbon-based and carbon-nitride-based ultrapure nanomaterials.

Marc Kamionkowski, a theoretical physicist and astrophysicist, has described how precise observations of the cosmic microwave background radiation can lead to deeper understanding of the origin and evolution of the universe. Kamionkowski and his collaborators have inspired a new generation of very sophisticated experiments that have begun the search for the signature of the Cosmic Gravitational-wave Background.

John Zachara, an environmental geochemist, has made seminal scientific contributions to understanding geochemical and microbiologic factors that are critical to the fate and transport of metals and radionuclides in the environment. His studies of how toxic metals travel in the subsurface environment of the Department of Energy Hanford site are helping provide science-based environmental cleanup solutions with broad applications.

Steven Zinkle, a materials scientist, is an expert on the effects of radiation on the properties of materials and has applied this understanding to help establish performance limits of materials in radiation environments. His work has focused on irradiation damage to materials required for nuclear fission and fusion reactors and for space reactor technologies

[ FYI Index ]

Harvard Names Drew G. Faust As its 28th President

Drew G. Faust, an eminent historian and outstanding academic leader who has served since 2001 as the founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, will become the twenty-eighth president of Harvard University, effective July 1.

An expert on the Civil War and the American South, and the leading figure in Radcliffe's transformation from a college into one of the country's foremost scholarly institutes, Faust was elected to the Harvard presidency by the members of the Harvard Corporation, with the consent of the University's Board of Overseers.

The appointment concludes a search launched in the spring of 2006, involving far-reaching consultation with faculty, students, staff, alumni, and others nationwide.

As the first dean of the Radcliffe Institute, Faust has guided the transformation of Radcliffe from a college into a wide-ranging institute for advanced study. Under her leadership, Radcliffe has emerged as one of the nation's foremost centers of scholarly and creative enterprise, distinctive for its multidisciplinary focus and the exploration of new knowledge at the crossroads of traditional fields. In recognition of its roots in Radcliffe College, the Institute maintains a special commitment to the study of women, gender, and society. To support its mission, Faust has directed a comprehensive administrative restructuring, secured the Institute's finances, attracted major new gifts, and undertaken an extensive renovation of Radcliffe's historic campus.

During Faust's deanship, Radcliffe's flagship fellowship program has become a prized opportunity for established and emerging scholars throughout the academic world. The Institute currently receives nearly 800 applicants for approximately 50 annual positions as fellows, and more than 45 Harvard faculty members have held Radcliffe fellowships since 2001.

adcliffe also engages the broader Harvard community in a variety of ways. Working with Harvard departments, the Institute has mounted annual science conferences on such topics as tissue engineering, privacy and security technology, and computational biology. Undergraduates participate in the life of the Institute through the Research Partners Program, which pairs students with Radcliffe fellows.

Since coming to Harvard, Faust has continued to write and lecture on the history of the American South and the Civil War. Her sixth book, This Republic of Suffering, forthcoming in 2008, considers the impact of the Civil War's enormous death toll on the lives of nineteenth-century Americans. Her fifth book, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (1996), was awarded the Society of American Historians' Francis Parkman Prize, honoring the year's best nonfiction book on an American theme.

As dean of Radcliffe, Faust has been an influential member of Harvard's Academic Advisory Group, which brings together the president, provost, and deans to consider matters of university policy. A devoted teacher and mentor, she is currently leading an undergraduate seminar on the Civil War and Reconstruction. In the spring of 2005, she oversaw the work of Harvard's Task Forces on Women Faculty and on Women in Science and Engineering. In 2004, she served on the Allston Task Force on Undergraduate Life.

Before coming to Harvard, Faust served for 25 years on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania. She was appointed as assistant professor in the Department of American Civilization in 1976, associate professor in 1980, and full professor in 1984. She was named the Stanley Sheerr Professor of History in 1988, then served as the Annenberg Professor of History from 1989 to 2000. She chaired the Department of American Civilization for five years, and was director of the Women's Studies Program from 1996 to 2000. She was twice honored at Penn for her distinguished teaching, in 1982 and 1996.

While at Penn, Faust served on a broad array of university committees, in such areas as academic planning and budgets, academic freedom, human resources, the university archives, and intercollegiate athletics. She was a member of Penn's presidential search committee in 1993-94 and chaired the presidential inaugural committee in 1994. From 1988 to 1990 she chaired the President's Committee on University Life, which addressed such issues as diversity on campus, interaction among faculty, students, and staff, and Penn's relations with its neighboring community.

Raised in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, Faust went on to attend Concord Academy in Massachusetts. She received her bachelor's degree from Bryn Mawr in 1968, magna cum laude with honors in history, and her master's degree (1971) and doctoral degree (1975) in American civilization from the University of Pennsylvania.

Faust has been active both as a member of nonprofit boards and in a range of professional societies. She is a trustee of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and Bryn Mawr College, where she chaired the trustee committee on student life from 1998 to 2003. She also serves on the educational advisory board of the Guggenheim Foundation. She was president of the Southern Historical Association in 1999-2000, vice president of the American Historical Association from 1992 to 1996, and an executive board member of both the Organization of American Historians and the Society of American Historians from 1999 to 2002. Faust has also served on numerous editorial boards and selection committees, including the jury for the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1986, 1990, and 2004 (chair). She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Society of American Historians.

[ FYI Index ]

Alan MacDiarmid Nobel-winning Chemist Dies

Alan G. MacDiarmid, 79, one of three scientists who shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in chemistry for the discovery of plastics that conducted electricity, died last week at Delaware County Memorial Hospital of injuries following a fall earlier in the day at his Drexel Hill home. He had been rushing to catch a plane to fly to his native New Zealand.Alan MacDiarmid

Dr. MacDiarmid had been a chemistry professor at the University of Pennsylvania since 1955. He joined The University of Texas at Dallas in August of 2002, when he filled the newly created James Von Ehr Distinguished Chair in Science and Technology and the Von Ehr.

"Alan was suffering from myelodysplastic syndrome, a blood disorder like leukemia," said his wife, Gayl Gentile. "He expected to live only a few weeks and wanted to say goodbye to his brothers and sister in New Zealand."

Dr. MacDiarmid shared the 2000 Nobel Prize with former Penn professor Alan J. Heeger, now at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and Hideki Shirakawa, of the University of Tsukuba in Japan. The work underlying the award showed that plastics, or polymers, can be made to conduct electricity as metals do. The research was conducted at Penn in the late 1970s.

The discovery came about by chance. Shirakawa had made a form of silver-colored polymer in his lab in Tokyo. Dr. MacDiarmid and Heeger had made similar silver films using sulfur nitride at Penn. Shirakawa was invited to Penn, and the three researchers infused iodine into the polymer. Electrical conductivity in the film increased 10 times in minutes.

This research introduced an unexpected phenomenon in chemistry and unleashed advancements that led to computer screen shields, windows that exclude sunlight, light-emitting diodes (LEDs), solar cells, bright cell-phone displays, and tiny televisions. The discovery spurred other scientists to use conductive polymers to develop molecular electronics that increase the speed and reduce the size of computers.

Born in Masterton, New Zealand, Dr. MacDiarmid wrote more than 600 research papers and held more than 30 patents. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of New Zealand and doctorates from the University of Wisconsin and the University of Cambridge in England.

In addition to his wife, Dr. MacDiarmid is survived by daughters Heather McConnell, Dawn Hazelett and Gail Williams; a son, Duncan; nine grandchildren; two brothers; and a sister.

A memorial service will be held at 3 p.m. March 2 on the Penn campus at Irvine Auditorium, 34th and Spruce Streets, Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA.

[ FYI Index ]

National Academy of Sciences Elects Home Secretary and Councilors

The National Academy of Sciences has elected a home secretary and four members to the Academy's governing council.

John I. Brauman, J.G. Jackson-C.J. Wood Professor of Chemistry, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif., has been elected to a second term as the Academy's home secretary. During his four-year term beginning July 1, 2007, he will continue to be responsible for the membership activities of the Academy.

Councilors elected to three-year terms beginning July 1, 2007, are Vicki L. Chandler, , director, BIO5 Institute, and Weiler Chair and Regents' Professor, departments of plant sciences and molecular and cellular biology, University of Arizona, Tucson; Margaret G. Kivelson, Distinguished Professor of Space Physics, department of earth and space sciences, University of California, Los Angeles; Sharon R. Long, Steere-Pfizer Professor in Biological Sciences and dean, School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford University; and Stanley B. Prusiner, director, Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases, and professor of neurology and biochemistry, University of California, San Francisco.

The Academy is governed by a 17-member council, which includes five officers (president, vice president, home secretary, foreign secretary, and treasurer) and 12 councilors elected from among the Academy membership.

[ FYI Index ]

Zimmer Announces Additional $50 Million in Aid for Graduate Students in Social Sciences, Humanities

The University of Chicago, which has some of the nation's leading programs in the Social Sciences and Humanities, will allocate nearly $50 million in additional funding over the next six years to ensure that doctoral students in those programs are among the most generously supported in all of higher education. Beginning this fall, a typical base aid package for incoming graduate students in those areas will be five-year support that includes tuition, health insurance, a $19,000 stipend per year to cover living expenses, and two summers of research support at $3,000 per summer. By the time the program is fully operational in six years, the University will be providing students with an estimated $13 million each year in new support.

"From the founding of the University of Chicago, our graduate programs have distinguished the University and influenced graduate training across higher education," said President Robert J. Zimmer."It is our obligation to support these programs at the highest level, allowing us to continue to attract emerging scholars who will shape academic fields and set the intellectual agenda in the decades to come."

The aid is expected to shorten the amount of time required to complete a Ph.D. by providing students with a level of support that will allow them to focus on their scholarship. The new program systematizes opportunities for students to develop a range of teaching experiences — a critical component of doctoral education — while maintaining current overall teaching expectations.

Currently, many graduate students in the Social Sciences and Humanities receive assistance, although the amount varies from student to student and from department to department. As the students reach their advanced training stage, many also receive national fellowships that help pay their expenses.

Each year, the University enrolls about 250 graduate students in the Social Sciences and Humanities Divisions, an enrollment level that will be maintained under the new graduate assistance program. This represents one of the largest and most comprehensive graduate programs in these areas among leading private research universities.

As part of this program, $1.5 million will be allocated to improve the resources available to current doctoral students in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The new funds will make it possible provide University-paid health insurance to students who have matriculated since 2003 for the balance of the first five years in their programs.

[ FYI Index ]

LaMarche Named Princeton Vice Provost

Paul LaMarche, a longtime University employee, has been named vice provost for space programming and planning, effective March 1.

Dr. LaMarche will work closely with the University's leadership team to support the formulation and assessment of ideas for new facilities and the renovation of existing buildings. He also will assist the provost in managing the fiscal and budgetary dimensions of the University's space planning and programming agenda.

LaMarche has been the physics department manager and director of operations since 2001. Among his responsibilities are overseeing the department's physical spaces, which include major research facilities, classrooms, offices, machine shops and stockrooms.

From 1986 to 1996, LaMarche worked at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, serving as a research staff physicist and as head of various groups conducting experiments at the lab. After two years at a technology firm in Massachusetts, he returned to the University to serve as project manager for the Borexino Solar Neutrino Detector Project, a joint effort with the Instituto Nazionale Fisica Nucleare in Italy for three years. In 2000-01, he also was a research engineer at the plasma physics lab.

LaMarche earned his bachelor's degree in physics from Boston College and his Ph.D. in physics from Yale University.

He will succeed Robert Barnett, who rejoined the Office of Design and Construction last fall to become program manager for the University's new facilities in the creative and performing arts. Barnett had worked in that office before becoming vice provost for University space planning in January 2004.

[ FYI Index ]

Kastner of Physics is New MIT Dean of Science

Marc A. Kastner, the Donner Professor of Science and current head of the Department of Physics, will succeed Class of 1942 Professor of Chemistry Robert J. Silbey as the next dean of the School of Science at MIT. Kastner has served as head of the Department of Physics since 1998; he will assume his new leadership role July 1.

Before his appointment as head of the Department of Physics, Kastner served for five years as director of the interdisciplinary Center for Materials Science and Engineering. From 1989 to 1997, he chaired the MIT Campus-Lincoln Laboratory Interaction Committee.

Kastner was educated at the University of Chicago, where he received his S.B. in chemistry and his Ph.D. in physics, and he joined the MIT faculty in 1973 after a research fellowship at Harvard University. His early research focused on amorphous semiconductors, materials which are useful for solar cells. He has also studied the physics of high-temperature superconductivity. In 1990 his group fabricated the first semiconductor single-electron transistor, and the group continues to use these devices to study the quantum mechanical behavior of electrons confined to nanometer dimensions. He has been the recipient of the David Adler Lectureship Award and the Oliver E. Buckley Prize, both awarded by the American Physical Society.

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