Class
| • | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | [X] |
| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Joanna Aizenberg | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2016 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 103. Engineering | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1960 | | | | | | |
Joanna Aizenberg pursues a broad range of research interests that include biomimetics, smart materials, wetting phenomena, bio-nano interfaces, self-assembly, crystal engineering, surface chemistry, structural color and biomineralization. She received the B.S. degree in Chemistry in 1981, the M.S. degree in Physical Chemistry in 1984 from Moscow State University, and the Ph.D. degree in Structural Biology from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1996.
After spending nearly a decade at Bell Labs, Joanna joined Harvard University, where she is the Amy Smith Berylson Professor of Materials Science, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Director of the Kavli Institute for Bionano Science and Technology and Platform Leader in the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. The Aizenberg lab's research is aimed at understanding some of the basic principles of biological architectures and the economy with which biology solves complex problems in the design of multifunctional, adaptive materials. She then uses biological principles as guidance in developing new, bio-inspired synthetic routes and nanofabrication strategies that would lead to advanced materials and devices, with broad implications in fields ranging from architecture to energy efficiency to medicine.
Aizenberg is elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Philosophical Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science; and she is a Fellow of American Physical Society and Materials Research Society. Dr. Aizenberg received numerous awards from the American Chemical Society and Materials Research Society, including Fred Kavli Distinguished Lectureship in Nanoscience, Ronald Breslow Award for the Achievement in Biomimetic Chemistry, Arthur K. Doolittle Award in Polymeric Materials, ACS Industrial Innovation Award, and was recognized with two R&D 100 Awards for best innovations in 2012 and 2013 for the invention of a novel class of omniphobic materials and watermark ink technologies. In 2015 she received Harvard’s most prestigious Ledlie Prize that is awarded for the most valuable contribution to science made by a Harvard scientist.
Joanna has served at the Board of Directors of the Materials Research Society and at the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. She served on the Advisory Board of Langmuir and Chemistry of Materials, on Board of Reviewing Editors of Science Magazine, and is an Editorial Board Member of Advanced Materials. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Jocelyn Bell Burnell | | | Institution: | University of Oxford; Royal Society of Edinburgh; Trinity College Dublin | | | Year Elected: | 2016 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1943 | | | | | | |
Jocelyn Bell Burnell is widely recognized as the individual responsible for the 1967 discovery of pulsars. With skill and perseverance she overcame the skepticism and resistance of her senior colleagues to make one of the most important and dramatic discoveries in 20th century astrophysics. In 2018 her essential role in the discovery was recognized by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation with a Special Breakthrough Prize. Bell Burnell donated the associated prize money to the Institute of Physics to support scholarships for individuals from underrepresented groups.
Later in her career she worked in infrared, X-ray and gamma-ray astrophysics. More recently she turned her attention to education including the public understanding of science where according to the Royal Society, her contribution "has been uniquely valuable." The Royal Society web site refers to Jocelyn Bell Burnell as "one of the most influential scientists in the UK." She was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2018. | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. Cynthia Dwork | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2016 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 107 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1958 | | | | | | |
Cynthia Dwork, an intellectual leader in the privacy-research community in computer science, has made fundamental contributions that speak to the role of information technology in society. She is leader and a co-founder of work on "differential privacy", which provides the first satisfactory theory for how to ensure privacy protection while enabling statistical analysis of large datasets with sensitive personal information. Her foundational work in this area has had revolutionary impact in such other disciplines as statistics and technology policy. Dwork has also made fundamental contributions to cryptography and distributed algorithms, including introducing the challenge of concurrent security in cryptographic protocols, the fundamental concept of "nonmalleability" in cryptography (where an adversary should not be able to modify cryptographic communications), and the idea of using hash chains as proofs of work (an idea underlying cryptocurrencies like BitCoin). Her distributed computing paper, "Achieving consensus in the presence of partial synchrony" received the Djikstra prize. She received the Goedel Prize in 2017 and the IEEE Hamming Medal in 2019. | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. James B. Hartle | | | Institution: | University of California, Santa Barbara; Santa Fe Institute | | | Year Elected: | 2016 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1939 | | | Death Date: | May 17, 2023 | | | | | | |
James Hartle was educated at Princeton University (AB,1960), and the California Institute of Technology where he completed a Ph.D.in 1964 with Murray Gell-Mann. He has held positions at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, and the University of Chicago. He is currently Research Professor and Professor of Physics Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara and an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute. His scientific work is concerned with the application of Einstein's relativistic theory of gravity --- general relativity --- to realistic astrophysical situations, especially cosmology. He has contributed usefully to the understanding of gravitational waves, relativistic stars, and black holes. He is currently interested in the quantum origin of the universe and the earliest moments of the big bang where the subjects of quantum mechanics, quantum gravity, and cosmology overlap. His work with Stephen Hawking on the quantum wave function of the universe is an example. He has been an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, a NATO Senior Science Fellow, and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and a founder and past director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics. He received the American Physical Society’s 2009 Einstein Prize for his work in gravitational physics. | |
| 5 | Name: | Dr. Stephen J. Lippard | | | Institution: | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | | | Year Elected: | 2016 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 102. Chemistry and Chemical Biochemistry | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1940 | | | | | | |
Stephen J. Lippard is the Arthur Amos Noyes Professor of Chemistry Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and studied at Haverford College (B.A. in Chemistry) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D. in Inorganic Chemistry). After a postdoctoral year at MIT during 1965-66, he joined the faculty of Columbia University where he served until moving to MIT in 1983. His research activities span the fields of inorganic chemistry, biological chemistry, and neurochemistry. Included are studies to understand and improve platinum anticancer drugs, the synthesis of dimetallic complexes as models for non-heme iron metalloenzymes, structural and mechanistic investigations of methane monooxygenase and related bacterial multicomponent monooxygenases, and inorganic neurotransmitters, especially nitric oxide and zinc. He has published 900 papers on these and other topics and has co-authored a popular textbook with Jeremy Berg entitled "Principles of Bioinorganic Chemistry." He supervised the Ph. D. thesis research of 115 graduate students and more than that number of postdoctoral associates, many of whom hold significant positions in academic, industrial, or government institutions or in the medical or legal professions. His honors include the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Chemistry, National Medal of Science, the Priestley Medal (highest award bestowed by the American Chemical Society), the Centenary Medal awarded by the Royal Society of Chemistry in the UK, the Pauling Medal, the James R. Killian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award from MIT, awarded to one member of the faculty each year, the F.A. Cotton Medal for Excellence in Chemical Research, Luigi Sacconi Medal from the Italian Chemical Society, co-recipient of the first Christopher J. Fredrickson Prize for Research in the Neurobiology of Zinc, ACS Ronald Breslow Award for Achievement in Biomimetic Chemistry, and election to the U. S. National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Royal Irish Academy, Italian Chemical Society, and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. He holds several honorary degrees. His research on platinum complexes led to the co-founding of Blend Therapeutics in 2011. Based in Watertown, Massachusetts, Blend (now Placon Therapeutics) has recently had an IND approved by the FDA to take a new platinum compound into a Phase I clinical trial for cancer treatment. | |
| 6 | Name: | Dr. Christopher John Pethick | | | Institution: | Nordita; Niels Bohr International Academy | | | Year Elected: | 2016 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1942 | | | | | | |
Christopher Pethick is a theoretical physicist of remarkable breadth and depth, whose seminal contributions to neutron star, ultracold atomic gas, and condensed matter physics have been recognized by his Onsager Prize for statistical physics and Bethe Prize for theoretical astrophysics. He gave the first consistent description of neutron stars, from their low density crust to their superfluid interior, their behavior during stellar collapse and subsequent cooling, and identified compact X-ray sources as accreting neutron stars. He provided the microscopic basis of our current understanding of liquid helium-3 at nonzero temperature, showed how related ideas could be used to understand the transport properties of heavy-fermion materials, and in a very different context, quark matter at high densities. Recently he has bridged the gap between atomic and condensed-matter physics by his imaginative application of condensed matter concepts to ultracold atomic gases. His major influence on Scandinavian science has been recognized by his election to the Royal Danish and Norwegian Academies of Sciences and Letters. | |
| 7 | Name: | Dr. Alar Toomre | | | Institution: | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | | | Year Elected: | 2016 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1937 | | | | | | |
Alar Toomre has been a true pioneer with his elegant and prescient studies, starting more than 40 years ago, of the evolution of the structure of galaxies. He introduced to these studies numerical simulations at a time when very clever approaches were needed to obtain useful results, due to the limitations of computer capabilities in that era. He also developed the deep stability criterion, the so-called Q criterion, for differentially rotating stellar disks. He was, in addition, the first to suggest and demonstrate that elliptical galaxies result from collisions of spiral galaxies. His early studies of galactic mergers were spectacular achievements. Overall, Toomre’s work has had a profound influence on the understanding of galactic dynamics and has largely set the direction of research in this now very vigorous and active field. Finally he made some substantial contributions to our understanding of the motions of the Earth about its center of mass. Among other awards, Toomre was awarded the 2014 Magellanic Premium of the American Philosophical Society in recognition of his beautiful and prescient numerical simulations over 40 years ago of the interactions of galaxies ("Galactic Bridges and Tails," carried out with his brother, Juri), and for his development a half century ago of the key local stability criterion (the "Q" criterion) for differentially rotating disks in galaxies. | |
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