Class
| • | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | [X] |
| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Lene Vestergaard Hau | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2023 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1959 | | | | | | |
Lene Vestergaard Hau is the Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and of Applied Physics and is the Area Chair for Applied Physics at Harvard University. Prior to joining the Harvard faculty in 1999, she was a senior scientist at the Rowland Institute for Science in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and holds a Ph.D. in Physics from University of Aarhus, Denmark. Hau led a team who succeeded in slowing a pulse of light to 15 miles per hour and also brought light to a stop. They took matters further as they stopped and extinguished a light pulse in one part of space, and subsequently revived it in a different location. In the process, the light pulse is converted to a perfect matter copy that can be stored, sculpted, and then turned back to light. These results represent the ultimate quantum control of light and matter. Hau’s team also utilized the great spatial compression of ultra-slow light pulses to generate quantum shock waves in Bose-Einstein condensates thereby opening up a new field for studies of the rich and dramatic nonlinear dynamics of these superfluid, cold atomic systems.
Hau has contributed to a wide variety of research fields. Her Ph.D. work was in theoretical condensed matter physics and she later shifted her attention to experimental and theoretical optical and atomic physics. Her research has included studies of ultra-cold atoms and superfluid Bose-Einstein condensates, as well as channeling of high-energy electrons, protons, and positrons in single crystals with experiments at CERN and Brookhaven National Laboratory. Her group has manipulated atomic matter waves with nanoscale structures, and performed protein studies at the single molecule level with biological nanopores.
She is a 2001 MacArthur Fellow, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Physical Society. Hau is also the recipient of numerous awards, including Harvard University’s Ledlie Prize, the Ole Roemer Medal, awarded by the University of Copenhagen, and the Richtmyer Memorial Lecture Award awarded by the American Association of Physics Teachers. In 2010, she was named "World Dane," and in 2012 "Thomson Reuters (Clarivate) Citation Laureate in Physics." In 2018 she was honored with the Lise Meitner Distinguished Lecture and Medal, sponsored by The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences through its Nobel Committee for Physics, and in 2019 with the Lars Onsager Lecture and Medal by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and the Dirac Medal and Lecture by the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, and the Australian Institute of Physics.
Lene Hau’s research is described on RadioLab’s "Master of the Universe." | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Vladimir Kučera | | | Institution: | Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics, Czech Technical University; Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic | | | Year Elected: | 2023 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 103. Engineering | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1943 | | | | | | |
Vladimír Kučera was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1943. He received the graduate degree summa cum laude in electrical engineering from Czech Technical University, Prague, in 1966 and the CSc. and DrSc. research degrees in engineering cybernetics from the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, Prague, in 1970 and 1979, respectively.
During 1967-2017 he was a Research Scientist at the Institute of Information Theory and Automation, one of the research institutes of the Academy of Sciences in Prague. He held various research and managerial positions, including Vice-Director (1986-1990) and Director (1990-1998) of the Institute. Since 2018, he has been a Scientist Emeritus at the Academy of Sciences. Starting in 1992, he taught graduate courses at the Czech Technical University in Prague and was appointed Professor of Engineering Cybernetics in 1996. During 1999-2000, he assumed the position of Head of the Control Engineering Department; in 2000 he was elected Dean of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering for the period 2000-2006; and during 2007-2015, he was the Director of the Masaryk Institute of Advanced Studies. In 2015, he was appointed Distinguished Researcher and Vice-Director of the Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics, the newly established research institute at the Czech Technical University in Prague.
Kučera held visiting positions at the National Research Council, Ottawa, Canada in 1970-1971; the University of Florida, Gainesville, the USA in 1977; Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Mécanique, Nantes, France in 1981-1982; Australian National University, Canberra, Australia in 1984; Uppsala Universitet, Sweden in 1989; Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados del IPN, Mexico City in 1991; ETH Zürich, Switzerland in 1992; the University of Newcastle, Australia in 1993; Politecnico di Milano, Italy in 1995 as well as many short visiting appointments. He was a Nippon Steel Professor at the Chair of Intelligent Control at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan, in 1994.
The research interests of Kučera include the theory of systems and automatic control. He contributed to the theory of matrix Riccati equations by classifying the set of all nonnegative definite steady-state solutions, showing that the set is a distributive lattice, and establishing necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of such solutions in terms of stabilizability and detectability; these results are fundamental for the design of linear-quadratic optimal control systems. He pioneered the use of polynomial diophantine equations in the synthesis of control systems; the polynomial equation approach found followers worldwide and inspired the development of efficient computational algorithms for polynomials and polynomial matrices.
The best-known result of Kučera is the parameterization of all controllers that stabilize a given system, known as the Youla-Kučera parameterization. It was obtained independently and at about the same time by Dante C. Youla and Kučera. The parameterization formula is due to Kučera, whereas the use of the parameter in H2 optimal control is due to Youla. The parameterization result launched an entirely new area of research with applications in optimal and robust control.
Recently, Kučera has resolved a long-standing open problem of control theory, the decoupling of linear systems by static-state feedback. He discovered the canonical form and the complete invariant of stable linear systems with respect to the group of stability-preserving system transformations and demonstrated the use of this result in control system design. During his research career, he had the pleasure of working with more than 80 researchers from 20 countries worldwide.
Kučera is the author of four books: Algebraic Theory of Discrete Linear Control (in Czech) (Academia, Prague 1978), Discrete Linear Control: The Polynomial Equation Approach (Wiley, Chichester 1979), Analysis and Design of Discrete Linear Control Systems (Prentice-Hall, London 1991), and Polynomial Methods for Control Systems Design, edited with M. J. Grimble (Springer, London 1996). In addition, he published over 400 research papers.
Kučera serves on the editorial boards of Int. J. Robust and Nonlinear Control, and Bull. Polish Acad. Sciences. He was Editor-in-Chief of Kybernetika (1990-1998), an Associate Editor of Automatica (1987-1996), and a member of the editorial boards of Syst. Control Letters (1987-1994), Int. J. Control (1990-1999), Int. J. Systems Science (1986-1999), and J. Math. Systems, Estimation and Control (1991-1998). He is a Life Advisor and Fellow (he was President 2002-2005) of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), Life Fellow of IEEE (the first Fellow ever in the Czech Republic/Czechoslovakia in 1996), and was a member of the IEEE Control Systems Society Board of Governors (1996-1998). He is a founding member and Fellow of the Engineering Academy of the Czech Republic (he was Vice-President from 1999 to 2006) and past Chairman of the Czech Committee for Automatic Control (1993-2002).
Kučera was the recipient of many prizes including the Prize of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in 1973, the Kybernetika Best Paper Award in 1976, the National Prize of the Czech Republic in 1989 for his contributions to the theory and practice of automatic control, the Automatica Prize Paper Award in 1990 for the paper Fundamental Theorem of State Feedback for Singular Systems, Hlávka Foundation Prize in 1992, Outstanding Service Award from IFAC in 1996, Medal of the Ministry of Education of the Czech Republic in 2000, Felber Gold Medal of the Czech Technical University in Prague, and in 2006 he was appointed Chevalier dans l’ordre des Palmes Académiques, a national order of France for distinguished academics. He is an Honorary Professor at the Northeastern University, Shenyang, China (1996) and received Doctor honoris causa degrees from Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse (2003), and Université Henri Poincaré, Nancy (2005). He is the 2021 laureate of the National Prize Česká hlava (Czech Mind), the most prestigious Czech award for science and research that scientists in the Czech Republic can achieve. | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. John C. Mather | | | Institution: | NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; University of Maryland | | | Year Elected: | 2023 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1946 | | | | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. Curtis T. McMullen | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2023 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 104. Mathematics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1958 | | | | |
| 5 | Name: | Dr. Marilyn Raphael | | | Institution: | University of California, Los Angeles; National Center for Atmospheric Research | | | Year Elected: | 2023 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1959 | | | | |
| 6 | Name: | Professor Dame Carol Robinson | | | Institution: | Kavli Institute for Nanoscience Discovery, University of Oxford | | | Year Elected: | 2023 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 102. Chemistry and Chemical Biochemistry | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1956 | | | | | | |
Professor Dame Carol Robinson DBE FRS FMedSci FRSC
Carol Robinson is the Dr. Lee’s Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford and is the first Director of Oxford’s Kavli Institute for Nanoscience Discovery. She is recognised for establishing mass spectrometry as a viable technology to study the structure and function of proteins. Carol graduated from the Royal Society of Chemistry in 1979 and completed her PhD at Cambridge University. After a career break of eight years to focus on her family, she became Professor of Mass Spectrometry at Cambridge, returning to Oxford in 2009 to take up her current position. Her work has attracted numerous awards including the 2022 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Chemistry, the 2022 Louis Jeantet Prize for Medicine and most recently the ASMS John B. Fenn Award for a Distinguished Contribution in Mass Spectrometry. Carol is the former President of the Royal Society of Chemistry, a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences USA and an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was awarded a DBE in 2013 for services to science and industry. | |
| 7 | Name: | Dr. David R. Walt | | | Institution: | Brigham and Women’s Hospital; Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2023 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 103. Engineering | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1953 | | | | | | |
David R. Walt is the Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Bioinspired Engineering at Harvard Medical School, Professor of Pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Core Faculty Member of the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, Associate Member at the Broad Institute, and is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor. Walt is the Scientific Founder of Illumina Inc., Quanterix Corp., and has co-founded multiple other life sciences startups including Ultivue, Inc., Arbor Biotechnologies, Sherlock Biosciences, Vizgen, Inc., and Torus Biosciences. He has received numerous national and international awards and honors for his fundamental and applied work in the field of optical microwell arrays and single molecules including the 2023 National Academy of Engineering’s Fritz J. and Dolores H. Russ Prize; the 2021 Kabiller Prize in Nanoscience and Nanomedicine, 2017 American Chemical Society Kathryn C. Hach Award for Entrepreneurial Success, the 2016 Ralph Adams Award in Bioanalytical Chemistry, the 2014 American Chemical Society Gustavus John Esselen Award, the 2013 Analytical Chemistry Spectrochemical Analysis Award, the 2013 Pittsburgh Analytical Chemistry Award, and the 2010 ACS National Award for Creative Invention. He serves on the NASEM Committee on Emerging Infectious Diseases in the 21st Century and has been a member and chair of multiple NASEM studies. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the U.S. National Academy of Medicine, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, and is inducted in the US National Inventors Hall of Fame. | |
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