APS Member History

Results: 8 Items	Modify Search \| New Search
Page: 1	Reset Page

1	Name:	Dr. Robert J. Birgeneau
	Institution:	University of California, Berkeley
	Year Elected:	2006
	Class:	1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
	Subdivision:	106. Physics
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Living
	Birth Date:	1942

	Robert J. Birgeneau became the ninth chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, on September 22, 2004. An internationally distinguished physicist, he is a leader in higher education and is well known for his commitment to diversity and equity in the academic community. He stepped down from the Chancellorship in May 2013 and returned to the faculty in the Department of Physics at Berkeley. Before coming to Berkeley, Birgeneau served four years as president of the University of Toronto. He previously was Dean of the School of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he spent 25 years on the faculty. He is a fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society of London, the American Philosophical Society and other scholarly societies. He has received many awards for teaching and research and is one of the most cited physicists in the world for his work on the fundamental properties of materials. In 2006, Birgeneau received a special Founders Award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences along with President John Hennessy of Stanford University and filmmaker George Lucas. Established in the 225th anniversary year of the Academy, this award honors men, women and institutions that have advanced the ideals and embody the spirit of the Academy founders - a commitment to intellectual inquiry, leadership and active engagement. In 2008, Birgeneau and President Nancy Kantor of Syracuse University received the 2008 Carnegie Corporation Academic Leadership Award as "Champions of Excellence and Equity in Education." The American Institute of Physics awarded him the Karl Taylor Compton Medal for Leadership in Physics in 2012. In 2015 he was honored with the 2015 Darius and Susan Anderson Distinguished Service Award of the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2016 he was chosen as the National Science Board's Vannevar Bush Awardee. A Toronto native, Birgeneau received his B.Sc. in mathematics from the University of Toronto in 1963 and his Ph.D. in physics from Yale University in 1966. He served on the faculty of Yale for one year, spent one year at Oxford University, and was a member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories from 1968 to 1975. He joined the physics faculty at MIT in 1975 and was named Chair of the Physics Department in 1988 and Dean of Science in 1991. He became the 14th president of the University of Toronto on July 1, 2000. He and his wife, Mary Catherine, have four grown children and eight grandchildren.

2	Name:	Dr. William H. Hooke
	Institution:	American Meteorological Society
	Year Elected:	2006
	Class:	1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
	Subdivision:	105. Physical Earth Sciences
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Living
	Birth Date:	1943

	William H. Hooke was a senior policy fellow at the American Meteorological Society from 2000-2022, and director of the Policy Program from 2001-2022. His current policy research interests include: natural disaster reduction; historical precedents as they illuminate present-day policy; and the nature and implications of changing national requirements for weather and climate science and services. He also directs AMS policy education programs, including the AMS Summer Policy Colloquium, and the AMS-UCAR Congressional Science Fellowship Program. From 1967-2000, Dr. Hooke worked for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and antecedent agencies. After six years of research in fundamental geophysical fluid dynamics and its application to the ionosphere, the boundary layer, air quality, aviation, and wind engineering, he moved into a series of management positions of increasing scope and responsibility. From 1973-80, he was Chief of the Wave Propagation Laboratory Atmospheric Studies Branch; from 1980-83 he rotated through a series of management development assignments; and from 1984-87 he directed NOAA's Environmental Sciences Group (now the Forecast Systems Lab), responsible for much of the systems R&D for the NWS Modernization, as well as a range of other weather and climate research activities. From 1987-93 he served as the Deputy Chief Scientist and Acting Chief Scientist of NOAA, setting policy and direction for $300M/year of NOAA R&D in oceanography, atmospheric science, hydrology, climate, marine biology, and associated technologies. Between 1993 and 2000, he held two national responsibilities: Director of the U.S. Weather Research Program Office, and Chair of the interagency Subcommittee for Natural Disaster Reduction of the National Science and Technology Council Committee on Environment and Natural Resources. Dr. Hooke was an adjunct faculty member at the University of Colorado from 1969-87 and served as a fellow of two NOAA Joint Institutes (CIRES, 1971-1977; CIRA 1987-2000). The author of over fifty refereed publications and co-author of one book, Dr. Hooke holds a B.S. (Physics Honors) from Swarthmore College (1964) and S.M. (1966) and Ph.D (1967) degrees from the University of Chicago. He is a Fellow of the AMS and a member of the American Philosophical Society. Currently, he chairs the NAS/NRC Disasters Roundtable and serves on the ICSU Planning Group on Natural and Human-Induced Environmental Hazards and Disasters.

3	Name:	Dr. John F. Nash
	Institution:	Princeton University
	Year Elected:	2006
	Class:	1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
	Subdivision:	104. Mathematics
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1928
	Death Date:	May 23, 2015

	John Nash introduced what is now called "Nash equilibrium" in non-cooperative games and proved that such an equilibrium always exists. This work is foundational for Game Theory and led to his Nobel Prize in Economics. No less impressive is his work in pure mathematics, where his very deep and difficult theorems on embedding of manifolds initiated a whole new field of research. Tragically disabled by schizophrenia for over 30 years, he provided inspiration for many fellow sufferers by completely recovering, as told in the book and motion picture A Beautiful Mind. He then resumed his research in mathematics, having served as a researcher at Princeton University from 1994 to his death in 2015. In addition to the Nobel Prize, among Dr. Nash's many honors are the John Von Neumann Theory Prize of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (1978), the American Mathematical Society's Steele Prize (1999), and Norway's Abel Prize (2015). A graduate of Princeton University (Ph.D., 1950), he is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1995) and the National Academy of Sciences (1996). He died May 23, 2015, at the age of 86 in New Jersey.

4	Name:	Dr. Henry Petroski
	Institution:	Duke University
	Year Elected:	2006
	Class:	1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
	Subdivision:	103. Engineering
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Deceased
	Birth Date:	1942
	Death Date:	June 14, 2023

	Henry Petroski is the Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering and a professor of history at Duke University. He is a graduate of Manhattan College, having earned his B.M.E. degree in 1963, and of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he received his Ph.D. in theoretical and applied mechanics in 1968. Before joining the Duke faculty in 1980, he taught at the University of Texas, Austin and served on the professional staff of Argonne National Laboratory. Dr. Petroski, who has been called "the poet laureate of technology," has written broadly on the topics of design, success and failure, and the history of engineering and technology. His books on these subjects, which are intended for professional engineers, students, and general readers alike, include To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design, which in 1987 was adapted for a BBC-television documentary; Design Paradigms: Case Histories of Error and Judgment in Engineering, which was named by the Association of American Publishers as the best general engineering book published in 1994; and Success Through Failure: The Paradox of Design, which was based on his 2004 Louis Clark Vanuxem Lectures at Princeton University. His Engineers of Dreams is a history of American bridge building. He has also written on commonplace objects in The Pencil; The Evolution of Useful Things; The Book on the Bookshelf; Small Things Considered; and The Toothpick, and has published collections of essays on engineering subjects under the titles Remaking the World and Pushing the Limits. His memoir about delivering newspapers in the 1950s and about what predisposed him to become an engineer is entitled Paperboy. Since 1991, he has written the engineering column in the bimonthly magazine American Scientist, and he also writes a column on the engineering profession for ASEE Prism. He is a professional engineer licensed in Texas and a chartered engineer registered in Ireland. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Humanities Center. Among his other honors are the Washington Award from the Western Society of Engineers, the Ralph Coats Roe Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the Civil Engineering History and Heritage Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers, whose history and heritage committee he now chairs. He holds honorary degrees from Clarkson University, Manhattan College, Trinity College (in Hartford, Conn.), and Valparaiso University, and has received distinguished engineering alumnus awards from Manhattan College and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is a Distinguished Member of the American Society of Civil Engineers and a Fellow of the Institution of Engineers of Ireland and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He is an honorary member of the Moles and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2006.

5	Name:	Dr. V. Ramanathan
	Institution:	Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego
	Year Elected:	2006
	Class:	1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
	Subdivision:	105. Physical Earth Sciences
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Living
	Birth Date:	1944

	V. (Ram) Ramanathan is the Victor C. Alderson Professor of Applied Ocean Sciences & Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO), University of California, San Diego, where he also directs the Center for Atmospheric Sciences. He is the Chairman of the UNEP sponsored Atmospheric Brown Cloud Project and was the co-chief scientist for the Indian Ocean Experiment (INDOEX), which led to the discovery of the South Asian brown haze. Dr. Ramanathan has made fundamental contributions to our modern understanding of global climate change and human impacts on climate and environment. He is widely recognized for establishing the impacts of non-CO2 trace gases in climate, particularly the contributions of chlorofluorocarbons as well as tropospheric and stratospheric ozone and for his research in understanding the effects of water vapor, clouds and aerosols in global climate change. More recently he demonstrated that soot can play an unexpectedly large role in global dimming. His work on the trace gas greenhouse effect linked chemistry in a fundamental way to climate, while his work on the radiative effects of tropospheric ozone and soot linked air pollution strongly with global warming. He was the first to demonstrate in 1975 that CFCs are major greenhouse gases and that adding one molecule of CFC to the atmosphere has the same greenhouse effect of adding more than 10,000 molecules of CO2. He then led a WMO study which concluded that numerous trace gases are significant contributors to global warming. He followed this up by predicting (with Madden) in 1980 that the global warming would be detectable by 2000, which was subsequently verified in 2001. He led innovative efforts to distinguish the effects of infrared absorption and reflection both by clouds and clear skies using global satellite data, and thereby provided new observational constraints on the influence of clouds in the Earth's energy budget. He also used the satellite data to show that water vapor greenhouse effect was a major amplifier of global warming. With Pitcher, et al., he played a key role in developing the first community climate model, now the major American climate simulation research model. During the 1990s, he designed and conducted two international field experiments, the Central Equatorial Pacific experiment with J. Kuettner and the Indian Ocean experiment with P. J. Crutzen. With INDOEX scientists from the U.S., Europe and India, he showed that black carbon and other aerosols in the widespread South Asian brown haze led to a large reduction of solar radiation reaching the surface (dimming) and increased solar heating of atmosphere with significant impacts on regional climate and monsoon rainfall. He is now studying the effects of Atmospheric Brown Clouds over Asia, including their effects on water and regional climate. For this purpose he is developing an observing system with light weight and long range unmanned aircraft vehicles with miniaturized instruments. He has received numerous honors including: the Buys Ballot Medal of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences given once every decade; the VOLVO environmental prize for pioneering work related to the greenhouse effect; the Rossby Medal which is the highest award given by the American Meteorological Society; induction into the National Academy of Sciences in April 2003; election by Pope John Paul II to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 2004; the 2018 Mendel Medal from Villanova University; and the 2021 Blue Planet Prize of Japan's Asahi Glass Foundation. He has served on numerous national and international committees and has given expert testimonies in the U.S. Congress. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2006.

6	Name:	Dr. Horst L. Stormer
	Institution:	Columbia University
	Year Elected:	2006
	Class:	1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
	Subdivision:	106. Physics
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Living
	Birth Date:	1949

	Horst Störmer has been the foremost leader in the study of the properties of electrons moving in thin layers fabricated for electronic and optical devices. His work was recognized with the Nobel Prize in 1998 for the discovery of the Fractional Quantum Hall effect which is understood to be a completely new state of matter. Energetic and charismatic, Dr. Störmer has been a true leader, training many graduate and postdoctoral students who have gone on to establish major programs at our best universities. He is currently Professor of Physics and Applied Physics and the founding Scientific Director of the Nanotechnology Institute at Columbia University, a highly successful academic enterprise, and he has also been affiliated with research departments of Bell Laboratories/ Lucent Technologies since 1977. A native of Germany, Dr. Störmer earned his Ph.D. from Stuttgart University (1977). He has been honored with the American Physical Society's Buckley Award (1984), the Franklin Institute's Franklin Medal (1998) and membership in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1992) and the National Academy of Sciences (1998).

7	Name:	Dr. Lonnie G. Thompson
	Institution:	Ohio State University
	Year Elected:	2006
	Class:	1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
	Subdivision:	105. Physical Earth Sciences
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Living
	Birth Date:	1948

	Lonnie G. Thompson is one of the world's foremost authorities on paleo-climatology and glaciology. He has led more than 50 expeditions during the last 30 years, conducting ice-core drilling programs in the world's polar regions as well as in tropical and subtropical ice fields. Recently, Dr. Thompson and his team developed lightweight solar-powered drilling equipment for the acquisition of histories from ice fields in the high Andes of Peru and on Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. The results of these histories, published in more that 180 articles, have contributed greatly toward the understanding of the Earth's past, present and future climate system. Other Thompson-led expeditions have recovered a 460-meter-long ice core, the world's longest from a mountain range (Alaska, 2002); the first tropic ice core (Peru, 1983); and cores containing the entire sequence of the Last Glacial Stage as well as cores dating over 750,000 years in age, the oldest outside the polar regions (Tibet, 1992). Dr. Thompson's research has resulted in major revisions in the field of paleoclimatology, in particular, by demonstrating how tropical regions have undergone significant climate variability, countering an earlier view that higher latitudes dominate climate change. Dr. Thompson has received numerous honors and awards. In 2005, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and was awarded the John and Alice Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement. In 2019 he became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been selected by Time magazine and CNN as one of "America's Best" in science and medicine. His research has been featured in hundreds of publications, including National Geographic and the National Geographic Adventure magazines. He and his team are the subject of a new book entitled: Thin Ice: Unlocking the Secrets of Climate in the World's Highest Mountains by Mark Bowen published in late 2005. In 2006, he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society and was also chosen to receive the Roy Chapman Andrews Society 2007 Distinguished Explorer Award. He has received the nation's highest honor in science, the 2005 National Medal of Science, and the 2012 Franklin Medal from the Franklin Institute. Lonnie Thompson was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2006.

8	Name:	Dr. Peter Guy Wolynes
	Institution:	Rice University
	Year Elected:	2006
	Class:	1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences
	Subdivision:	102. Chemistry and Chemical Biochemistry
	Residency:	Resident
	Living? :	Living
	Birth Date:	1953

	Peter G. Wolynes was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1953. He completed his undergraduate studies at Indiana University, receiving an A.B. degree in 1971. He then took up the study of statistical mechanics at Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. in chemical physics in 1976. After a brief postdoctoral study with John Deutch at MIT, Dr. Wolynes returned to Harvard as an assistant professor in 1976. During the next four years at Harvard, Dr. Wolynes worked on the dynamical theory of electrolyte solutions, as well as on the then-nascent theoretical study of molecular dynamics of proteins. His early work on the theory of chemical reaction rates in condensed phases paved the way for the explosion of theoretical developments in this area throughout the 1980s. In 1980 Dr. Wolynes moved to the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he progressed to be the Eiszner Professor of Chemistry and a Center for Advanced Study Professor of Chemistry, Physics and Biophysics. During the years he spent at Illinois, Dr. Wolynes worked on a wide range of theoretical problems in chemical physics, including the theory of the glass transition and the development of new techniques for studying quantum dynamics in condensed phases. He developed, in 1981, the quantum mechanical version of Kramers' celebrated 1940 theory of chemical reaction rates in solution. In addition, Dr. Wolynes provided a new picture of how energy flows quantum mechanically in moderate-sized molecules. Dr. Wolynes' interest in applying statistical mechanics to biology grew while he was at Illinois. He introduced energy landscape ideas to the field of protein folding, providing a statistical mechanical framework to understand how a one-dimensional sequence of amino acids folds to its native structure on a biologically relevant time-scale. These ideas have led to what has been termed the "New View" of protein folding kinetics. Energy landscapes have also proved useful in developing algorithms to predict protein structure from sequence. Dr. Wolynes' scientific contributions have been acknowledged in many ways. He received the ACS Award in Pure Chemistry in 1986, the Fresenius Award in 1988, the Peter Debye Award for Physical Chemistry in 2000 and the Biological Physics Prize of the American Physical Society in 2004. Among other external appointments, he was the Hinshelwood lecturer at Oxford in 1997 and Fogarty Scholar-in-Residence at the National Institutes of Health starting in 1994. He was elected in 1991 to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and in 2003 was elected a Fellow of the Biophysical Society. In 2000 Dr. Wolynes moved to University of California, San Diego, where he held the Francis Crick Chair in the Physical Sciences. In addition to continuing his work on many body chemical physics and protein folding he is now studying stochastic aspects of cell biology. In 2011, Dr. Wolynes moved to Rice University in Texas where he is the D.R. Bullard-Welch Foundation Professor of Science.