Class
| • | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | [X] |
| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Eshel Ben-Jacob | | | Institution: | Tel Aviv University; Rice University | | | Year Elected: | 2014 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1952 | | | Death Date: | June 5, 2015 | | | | | | |
Eshel Ben-Jacob was a professor of Physics and Astronomy, Maguy-Glass Prof. in Physics of Complex Systems and Member of the Sagol School of Neuroscience at Tel Aviv University, Israel. He was also an Adjunct Prof. of Biosciences and Senior Investigator at the Center of Theoretical Biological Physics (CTBP) at Rice University. Prof. Ben-Jacob finished his PhD in Physics (1982) at Tel Aviv University, during which he investigated the nonlinear dynamics and noise effects in networks of superconductors. He spent three years (1981-1984) as a post doctoral fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Physics (ITP; today KITP) at the University of California Santa Barbara and made his first groundbreaking work during that time. He and his collaborators solved the long standing "snowflake" problem, formulated by Kepler back in 1610, and lay the foundations of self-organization and pattern formation in open systems far from equilibrium - a field he pioneered and in which he made several breakthroughs (e.g., comprehending the singular interplay between the micro and macro level dynamics, formulating new self-consistent selection principles, founding a new theory of morphology selection). At the same time, Ben-Jacob suggested and showed, theoretically and experimentally, that Coulomb effect can be utilized to control single electron quantum tunneling in sub-micron systems. This led him to the invention (1988) of a transistor operating by single electron tunneling. He was awarded the Landau Prize for research in 1986. Ben-Jacob continued to study quantum effects in small systems, predicting (in the 90s) that flux solitons can behave as quantum relativistic particles.
Enthralled by the even greater challenge posed by self-organization in living systems, Ben-Jacob embarked on a new direction of applying physics principles and investigation methods to biology. His first and ongoing effort was bacterial colony development, believing that the foundations of cognition are rooted in these most fundamental life forms - in their abilities to assess the environment, process the information they sense, and adapt accordingly. Among his achievements in the last two decades in physical microbiology were revealing the principles of self organization in bacterial colonies and of collective decision making by social bacteria.
While continuing to work on bacteria, Ben-Jacob turned to apply what he learned there to studies of neural network organization and task performance. Here, his most noticeable accomplishment was the first imprinting of multiple memories in live neuronal networks outside the brain utilizing his new "functional holography" analysis of the network activity. Being recognized as a revolutionary step in Networks Neuroscience, this endeavor was selected by Scientific American as one of the 50 most important achievements in all fields of science and technology in 2007. Ben-Jacob then utilized the "functional holography" method for analyzing recorded human brain activity with application to epilepsy. He applied his methods in clinical studies of brain repair from stroke and traumatic brain injuries by hyperbaric oxygen therapy.
Ben-Jacob's last endeavor was applying what he learned from the microbial world in cancer research. Here he promoted the idea that cancer cells, like bacteria, use advanced communication and cooperation through which they migrate, colonize new organs, develop drug resistance, deceive the immune system and enslave stromal cells. In line of this paradigm, he worked on revealing the operational principles underlying these lethal traits and developing a new theoretical framework to studying new classes of therapeutic strategies intended to defeat cancer by means of "cyberwar", i.e. targeting its communication, cooperation and control.
Prof. Ben-Jacob served as vice president (1998-2001) and President (2001-2004) of the Israel Physical Society. He was granted the award of Cavaliere dell'Ordine della Stella della solidarietà Italiana for promotion of science and science culture (2008). He was awarded the Weizmann prize in Physical Sciences in 2013 for "innovative application of physical methods to the study of biological communities such as bacteria colonies, neural networks, and tumors" and inducted an International member of the American Philosophical Society in mathematical and physical sciences in 2014. He died on June 5, 2015, in Tel Aviv, Israel, at the age of 63. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Inez Y. Fung | | | Institution: | University of California, Berkeley | | | Year Elected: | 2014 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1949 | | | | | | |
Inez Fung's research focuses on climate change and the global carbon cycle. Her work in climate modeling predicts the co-evolution of carbon dioxide and climate and concludes that the diminishing capacities of the land and oceans to store carbon act to accelerate global warming.
A native of Hong Kong, Inez Fung received her S.B. in Applied Mathematics and her Sc.D. in Meteorology from MIT. After her NRC postdoctoral fellowship at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, she was affiliated with NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Columbia University's Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, and the University of Victoria in Canada. She joined the faculty of the University of California, Berekely in 1998 and is a Professor of Atmospheric Science in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science and the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management.
Among her numerous honors are Fellowship in the American Meteorological Society and of the American Geophysical Union; the Roger Revelle Medal of the American Geophysical Union; membership of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences (USA) and Academia Sinica (Taiwan); and the 2019 Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal from the American Meteorological Society. She was a contributing author to the Assessment Reports of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Vice President Al Gore.
Fung is a subject in a biography series for middle-school readers "Women's Adventure in Science" launched by the National Academy of Sciences. The title of her biography is "Forecast Earth." | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. Julia Hirschberg | | | Institution: | Columbia University | | | Year Elected: | 2014 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 107 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1947 | | | | | | |
Julia Hirschberg is Percy K. and Vida L. W. Hudson Professor of Computer Science and Chair of the Computer Science Department at Columbia University. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania and also has a PhD in History from the University of Michigan. She worked at Bell Laboratories and AT&T Laboratories -- Research from 1985-2003 as a Member of Technical Staff and a Department Head, creating the Human-Computer Interface Research Department. She served as editor-in-chief of Computational Linguistics from 1993-2003 and co-editor-in-chief of Speech Communication from 2003-2006 and is now on the Editorial Board. She was on the Executive Board of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) from 1993-2003, on the Permanent Council of International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP) since 1996, and on the board of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) from 1999-2007 (as President 2005-2007, Advisory Council 2007--). She now serves on the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee, the Executive Board of the Computing Research Associate (CRA), the Association for the Advancement of Artifical Intelligence (AAAI) Council, the Executive Board of the North American ACL, and the board of the CRA-W. She has been active in working for diversity at AT&T and at Columbia. She has been an AAAI fellow since 1994, an ISCA Fellow since 2008, and a (founding) ACL Fellow since 2011. She received an Honorary Doctorate (Hedersdoktor) from KTH in 2007, a Columbia Engineering School Alumni Association (CESAA) Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award in 2009, the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award in 2011, the ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement in 2011, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2017. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2018. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2014. | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. Pierre Hohenberg | | | Institution: | New York University | | | Year Elected: | 2014 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1934 | | | Death Date: | December 15, 2017 | | | | | | |
Pierre Hohenberg received his PhD from Harvard University in 1962. After postdoctoral positions in Moscow and Paris he was a staff member at Bell Laboratories until 1995. During the period 1974-1977 he was also a professor of Physics at the Technical University in Munich. From 1995 to 2004 he served as Deputy Provost for Science and Technology at Yale University. In 2004 he moved to NYU as the Senior Vice Provost for Research, until 2010, when he joined the Department of Physics as professor. He became emeritus in 2013. Hohenberg's principal areas of scholarship included condensed matter physics, statistical
physics, non-equilibrium phenomena and the foundations of quantum
mechanics and the philosophy of science. He was particularly well-known as one of the originators of Density Functional Theory and of the Dynamical Scaling Theory of critical phenomena.
He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, fellow of the American Physical Society, fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was the recipient of the Fritz London Prize for Low Temperature Physics, the Max Planck Medaille of the German Physical Society and the Lars Onsager Prize of the American Physical Society. In addition, he served on numerous advisory committees to universities, federal agencies, and national and international professional organizations. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2014. Pierre Hohenberg died December 15, 2017, at the age of 84. | |
| 5 | Name: | Dr. Susan W. Kieffer | | | Institution: | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign | | | Year Elected: | 2014 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1942 | | | | | | |
Susan W. Kieffer became Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2013, where she had served as Center for Advanced Study Professor of Geology and Physics, Walgreen University Chair, and affiliate faculty member in Civil and Environmental Engineering since 2000. After she received a Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology she was assistant professor of geology at the University of California, Los Angeles, 1973-79, a geologist for the U.S. Geological Survey, 1979-90, professor of geology, 1989-91, and Regents' Professor of Geology, 1991-93, at Arizona State University, and professor of geological sciences and head of geological sciences at the University of British Columbia, 1993-95. In 1995 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and co-founded Kieffer & Woo, Inc. the following year.
Susan Kieffer pursues an eclectic mix of research in geophysical fluid dynamics. Phenomena she has investigated range from rapids in the Grand Canyon, to supersonic volcanic eruptions, to the mysterious workings of the Old Faithful geyser, to the jet of water vapor erupting from Enceladus, to plumes of volcanic ash and gas. All these systems have complex fluid dynamics as a key part of the problem, but each one of them required synthesis of concepts reaching beyond fluid dynamics. Kieffer has been very creative and fearless in attacking these various problems and finding the various tools needed to solve them. She developed a theory for predicting the thermodynamic properties of minerals, work that earned her the Mineralogical Society of America’s award for distinguished work in mineralogy. More recently, she has focused on Earth-related disasters. Her book, The Dynamics of Disaster, and blog, "Geology in Motion," bring the relevant science to a wide audience and also provide thoughtful consideration of the impacts on society of rare yet cataclysmic events.
Susan Kieffer was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1986 and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1988. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2014. | |
| 6 | Name: | Dr. Saul Perlmutter | | | Institution: | University of California, Berkeley; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory | | | Year Elected: | 2014 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1959 | | | | |
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