The two astronomers, who both worked actively until recent years at the university's Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences, coming to campus each day and publishing papers, are best known for their work in the mid-1950s describing how stars synthesize nearly all the chemical elements in the universe, from carbon and iron to lead and uranium. That work was summarized in a seminal paper on stellar nucleosynthesis published in 1957 with two other legendary scientists- British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle and American physicist William Fowler. Two years later, the two Burbidges received the American Astronomical Society's highest honor for young astronomers, the Warner Prize. "This was without question one of the most important papers of all time in astrophysics," said Mark Thiemens, dean of the Division of Physical Sciences at UCSD. "I've read it many times. Geoff was one of the most noteworthy astrophysicists of the past 50 years."

"This paper laid the foundation for an entirely new kind of synthesis of astronomical observations with frontier nuclear and particle science, paving the way for much of modern astrophysics and cosmology," said George Fuller, a nuclear astrophysicist and the director of the Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences, or CASS. Burbidge pioneered the development of several sub-disciplines in astrophysics.

"He is famous for his work on radio galaxies in which he was the first to determine the enormous energies involved," said Art Wolfe, an astrophysicist at UCSD and former director of CASS. "This work ultimately led astrophysicists to consider gravitation as the energy source for these objects as well as for quasars. Much of the Burbidges' work revolved around the nature of quasars and active galactic nuclei. During the 1960s the Burbidges were virtually alone in their efforts to measure the masses of galaxies from their rotation speeds."

"Geoff Burbidge also was the first to show that the helium in the universe could not have come from stellar nucleosynthesis alone," said Fuller. According to close colleagues, all of his work had a profound influence on the development of modern astrophysics and cosmology. On the Big Bang theory, he was a contrarian. He, with Fred Hoyle and others, argued controversially for a quasi-steady state cosmology in which quasars are new matter ejected from energetic galaxies in a cyclic universe. In this view, bright quasars are nearby objects in spite of their high redshifts. He maintained this position right up to his last paper, published shortly before his death, in which he presented statistical evidence that bright quasars are strongly overabundant nearby active spiral galaxies.

Burbidge was born on September 24, 1925 in Chipping Norton, England and received his bachelor's degree from the University of Bristol and his doctorate in theoretical physics from University College in London. From 1950 until his arrival at UC San Diego in 1962, he held research and teaching positions at the University of London, Harvard, Cambridge, Chicago, Caltech and the Mt. Wilson and Palomar Observatories. He served as a professor of physics at UC San Diego from 1963 until 2002, except for the period from 1978 to 1984, during which he served as director of the Kitt Peak National Observatory.

In addition to the Warner Prize and the Royal Astronomical Society's Gold Medal, Burbidge received the Catherine Wolfe Bruce Gold Medal in 1999 from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and was its president from 1974 to 1976. He also won the Jansky Prize of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in 1985, the National Academy of Sciences Award for Scientific Reviewing in 2007 and served for many years as the scientific editor of The Astrophysical Journal. He was an elected fellow of the Royal Society, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Physical Society and University College, London.

Geoffrey Burbidge is survived by his wife, Margaret of La Jolla; his daughter Sarah of San Francisco; and his grandson, Connor Loeven. In lieu of flowers, the family wishes that donations be made to the San Diego Humane Society, 5500 Gaines Street, San Diego, CA 92110

Physics Professor José Onuchic has been elected a Corresponding Member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (Academia Brasileira de Ciências). Onuchic, who is co-director of the Center for Theoretical Biophysics, will officially be inducted to the academy on May 4, 2010 at Copacobana Palace in Rio de Janeiro.

The 620 member academy was founded in 1916 and remains the country's foremost scientific association.

More information on the academy's new members can be obtained at: Academic Brasileira de Ciencias

Scientists studying how bacteria under stress collectively weigh and initiate different survival strategies say they have gained new insights into how humans make strategic decisions that affect their health, wealth and the fate of others in society.

Their study, published this week in the early online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was accomplished when the scientists applied the mathematical techniques used in physics to describe the complex interplay of genes and proteins that colonies of bacteria rely upon to initiate different survival strategies during times of environmental stress. Using the mathematical tools of theoretical physics and chemistry to describe complex biological systems is becoming more commonplace in the emerging field of theoretical biological physics.

The authors of the new study are theoretical physicists and chemists at the University of California, San Diego's Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, the nation's center for this activity funded by the National Science Foundation, and Tel Aviv University in Israel. They say that how genes are turned on and off in bacteria living under conditions of stress not only shed light on how complex biological systems interact, but provide insights for economists and political scientists applying mathematical models to describe complex human decision making. Continued...

Physicists at UC San Diego have successfully created speedy integrated circuits with particles called "excitons" that operate at commercially cold temperatures, bringing the possibility of a new type of extremely fast computer based on excitons closer to reality.

Their discovery, detailed this week in the advance online issue of the journal Nature Photonics, follows the team's demonstration last summer of an integrated circuit"an assembly of transistors that is the building block for all electronic devices"capable of working at 1.5 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero. That temperature, equivalent to minus 457 degrees Fahrenheit, is not only less than the average temperature of deep space, but achievable only in special research laboratories.

Now the scientists report that they have succeeded in building an integrated circuit that operates at 125 degrees Kelvin, a temperature that while still a chilly minus 234 degrees Fahrenheit, can be easily attained commercially with liquid nitrogen, a substance that costs about as much per liter as gasoline.

"Our goal is to create efficient devices based on excitons that are operational at room temperature and can replace electronic devices where a high interconnection speed is important," said Leonid Butov, a professor of physics at UCSD, who headed the research team. "We're still in an early stage of development. Our team has only recently demonstrated the proof of principle for a transistor based on excitons and research is in progress."

Excitons are pairs of negatively charged electrons and positively charged "holes" that can be created by light in a semiconductor such as gallium arsenide. When the electron and hole recombine, the exciton decays and releases its energy as a flash of light.

The fact that excitons can be converted into light makes excitonic devices faster and more efficient than conventional electronic devices with optical interfaces, which use electrons for computation and must then convert them to light for use in communications devices.

"Our transistors process signals using excitons, which like electrons can be controlled with electrical voltages, but unlike electrons transform into photons at the output of the circuit," Butov said. " This direct coupling of excitons to photons allows us to link computation and communication."

Other members of the team involved in the discovery were physicists Gabriele Grosso, Joe Graves, Aaron Hammack and Alex High at UC San Diego, and materials scientists Micah Hanson and Arthur Gossard at UC Santa Barbara.

Their research was supported by the Army Research Office, the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.

An astrophysicist at the University of California, San Diego whose wide-ranging research advanced our understanding of how stars, spiral galaxies and planetary systems form has been awarded the $1-million Shaw Prize in Astronomy.

Frank H. Shu, a professor of physics UC San Diego, will receive the award "in recognition of his outstanding lifetime contributions in theoretical astronomy" by the Shaw Prize Foundation in Hong Kong, which announced the award today. The prize will be formally presented to him at a ceremony on October 7.

The foundation's award, which includes a medal of the philanthropist Sir Run Run Shaw, is annually bestowed on individuals who have made "distinguished and significant" achievements in three categories: astronomy, life science and medicine, and the mathematical sciences. First awarded in 2004, it is sometimes referred to as the "Nobel Prize of the East."

"This award is a significant honor for both Frank Shu and UC San Diego," said Chancellor Marye Anne Fox. "It's a validation of the tremendous impact that Frank has had on advancing the field of astronomy."

"Frank has long been one of my scientific heroes," said Mark Thiemens, Dean of UC San Diego's Division of Physical Sciences. "This prize is one more validation of how significant his influence has been to astronomy, astrophysics and cosmochemistry."

Just last month Shu was honored by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, which announced that he had won its 2009 Catherine Wolfe Bruce Gold Medal for a lifetime of achievement in astronomy.

Shu's work on the origins of stars over a span of 30 years generated a comprehensive and widely accepted theory that explains the main events in the birth and evolution of a star from the collapse of a cloud of molecules, to the accretion of a magnetized disk of material from which planets form to the appearance of jets and other outflows from a star system.

The theory Shu and his students developed also predicted that comets, once thought to form from pristine materials in the coldest regions of interplanetary space, would contain bits of rock highly transformed by heat. Their unconventional view, put forth in 1996, was confirmed a decade later with the return of dust samples from Comet Wild.

Shu received a bachelor's degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1963 and a PhD in astronomy from Harvard University in 1968. He has served on the faculties of the State University of New York at Stony Brook and UC Berkeley. From 2002 to 2006, Shu served as president of National Tsing Hua University of Taiwan. He joined the faculty at UC San Diego as a distinguished professor of physics in 2006 and also holds the title of University Professor, a UC system-wide honor reserved for scholars of international distinction who are recognized as teachers of exceptional ability.

The interdisciplinary Center will involve researchers at UCSD, UCI, UCSC, Univ Wisconsin, Courant Institute (NYU), and the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab. The new center will work synergistically with Diamond's existing SciDAC Center for Turbulent Transport in Burning Plasmas. The total funding of the new CMTFO will be approximately $6.7 million over 5 years.

From left: Professor Hans Paar, Alex Frenzel, Aris Alexandradinata, Ilya Valmianski

The MURI titled "Search for New Superconductors for Energy and Power Applications" funded at a level of $ 7M, directed by Prof. I. K. Schuller, will search for new superconductors for a variety of applications. The photograph shows the type of equipment that Prof. Schuller's team will be using for the discovery of new superconductors. Prof. M. B. Maple is one of the principal investigators in the MURI titled "Broad Based Search for New and Practical Superconductors."

Prof. L. J. Sham is a principal investigator in a MURI titled "Quantum Optical Circuits of Hybrid Quantum Memories." These MURI initiatives are all dedicated to interdisciplinary work in which researchers from many disciplines including physics, chemistry, materials science and engineering are jointly tackling important problems for the nation. The Physical Sciences Division at UCSD is a strong supporter of this type of interdisciplinary research which also provides the facilities and research funds to support young pre and post doctoral researchers.

The award program was established at UC San Diego through the generosity of Chris and Warren Hellman to provide financial support and encouragement to young faculty and enhance their progress toward tenure.

"Due to the outstanding caliber of the proposals submitted, the selection process was quite a challenge this year," said Paul W. Drake, senior vice chancellor, Academic Affairs. "Forty-two proposals were submitted by Arts & Humanities and Social Sciences faculty, of which 21 were selected for funding. Twelve proposals were selected for funding out of 24 submitted by the Biological Sciences, Physical Sciences and Engineering Divisions. Given the current economic climate, both selection committees chose to partially fund a number of these proposals in an effort to stretch the funds to assist a greater number of promising young faculty," Drake said.

Recipients of the Physical & Biological Sciences and Engineering awards include Ery Arias-Castro and Jiawang Nie, mathematics; Jennifer Cha and Liangfang Zhang, nanoengineering; Alison Coil, Olga Dudko and Oleg Shpyrko, physics; Joshua Figueroa and Michael Tauber, chemistry and biochemistry; Colin Jamora and Emily Troemel, cell and developmental biology; and Gert Lanckriet, electrical and computer engineering.

Arts & Humanities and Social Sciences awardees were Syed Ali, economics; Ivano Caponigro, linguistics; Robert Castro, theatre and dance; Dennis Childs, Amelia Glaser, Anna Springer and Luis Martin-Cabrera, literature; Nitin Govil and John McMurria, communication; Adria Imada, Sara Kaplan and K. Wayne Yang, ethnic studies; Nancy Kwak and Patrick Patterson, history; Lei Liang, music; April Linton, sociology; Edmund Malesky, IRPS; Sebastian Saiegh, political science; Clinton Tolley and Christian Wuthrich, philosophy, and Alison Wishard Guerra, education studies.

Award winners are invited to spend a period of up to one year cooperating on a long-term research project with specialist colleagues at a research institution in Germany.

This lecture is generously supported by financial contributions from the Kroll family and friends, the Department of Physics, and the Institute of Physics & Applied Physical Sciences.

4:00 P.M.
Thursday, May 28, 2009

Basic Science Building, Garren Auditorium
3:30 P.M. Reception - Basic Science Building Courtyard

About the Speaker

Professor Paul L. McEuen is a leading expert in carbon nanotubes and applications of nanoelectronics in chemistry and biology. His research explores the science and technology of nanostructures, particularly carbon-based systems such as nanotubes and graphene, novel fabrication techniques at the nanometer scale, scanned probe microscopy of nanostructures, and the assembly and measurement of chemical and biological nanostructures.

Dr. McEuen is currently the Goldwin Smith Professor of Physics at Cornell University, which he joined in January 2001. From 1992 to 2000, he was a principal investigator at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he received the LBNL Outstanding Performance Award in 1997. In 2001, Dr. McEuen was awarded the Agilent Technologies Europhysics Prize for his pioneering research in carbon nanotubes.

"It was a great pleasure to learn of Frank winning the Bruce Medal," said Mark Thiemens, dean of the Division of Physical Sciences at UC San Diego who works in related fields. "I have known his work intimately over the years, and he has always been a scientific hero to me. Its great and fitting that he has received this recognition."

Shu has made paradigm-shifting contributions to our understanding of how astronomical structures such as stars and spiral galaxies form. His work on the origins of stars over a span of 30 years has generated a comprehensive and widely accepted theory that explains the main events in the birth and evolution of a star from the collapse of a cloud of molecules, to the accretion of a magnetized disk of material from which planets form to the appearance of jets and other outflows from a star system.

The theory Shu and his students developed also predicted that comets, once thought to form from pristine materials in the coldest regions of interplanetary space, would contain bits of rock highly transformed by heat. Their unconventional view, put forth in 1996, was confirmed a decade later with the return of dust samples from Comet Wild.

Shu received a bachelor's degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1963 and a PhD in astronomy from Harvard University in 1968. He has served on the faculties of SUNY Stony Brook and UC Berkeley. From 2002-2006, Shu served as president of National Tsing Hua University of Taiwan. He joined the faculty at UC San Diego as a distinguished professor of physics in 2006 and also holds the title of University Professor, a system-wide honor reserved for scholars of international distinction who are recognized as teachers of exceptional ability.

The Astronomical Society of the Pacific will present the medal at the annual meeting in Millbrae, California in September.

The telescope will be fully functional in about a year. And when that time comes University of California, San Diego cosmologist Brian Keating and his colleagues will have the inside track in the race to become the first to discover what happened in the first billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second after the universe was formed.

If Keating's group, which includes UCSD's Hans Paar, and researchers from UC Berkeley, as well as some from Canada, France and Japan, was to achieve this insight into what he calls the "embryonic universe," they would not only be able to more precisely explain the origin of the universe, but also its future. Their reputations would be cemented in annals of astrophysics, and they'd be in the running for a Nobel Prize.

With the telescope, dubbed POLARBEAR (short for Polarization of Background Radiation), the scientists are trying to detect primordial gravitational waves. The existence of these waves would support the theory of inflation, which holds that right after the Big Bang, there was an incredibly rapid and violent expansion of the universe.

Prof. Dudko received the award for her proposal to develop new theoretical approaches that will advance our understanding of fundamental physical principles that govern the structure formation and functioning of biological macromolecules at the single-molecule level. The proposed strategy is to use the great explanatory power of non-equilibrium physics to target for rapid advances the emerging field of single-molecule biophysics, and at the same time to motivate new physical concepts through the exploration of biological processes at the level of individual biomolecules.

Prof. .Dudko's group uses theoretical and computational methods with the focus on quantitative, analytically tractable descriptions. More information on Prof. Dudko's research is available at http://dudko.ucsd.edu

The American Academy of Arts & Sciences honors the country's leaders in scholarship, business, the arts and public affairs. New members will be formally welcomed into the Academy at an Induction Ceremony in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 10, 2009.

Founded in 1780, the Academy annually elects individuals who have made preeminent contributions to their disciplines and to society at large. The 2009 class of scholars, scientists, artists, civic, corporate and philanthropic leaders elected as fellows of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences includes 210 new Fellows and 19 new Foreign Honorary Members from 28 states and 11 countries.

Jose Nelson Onuchic has since 2002 co-directed the Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, which encompasses a broad spectrum of research and training activities at the forefront of the interface between biology and physics. This interdisciplinary approach--carried out jointly by physicists, chemists, mathematicians and biologists--has provided biologists with a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms governing complex biological systems. Onuchic's research centers on theoretical and computational methods for molecular biophysics and chemical reactions in condensed matter with a special focus on protein folding and electron transfer in biological systems. Onuchic received his bachelor's degrees in both physics and electrical engineering from the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil and his Ph.D. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

(Map to Lecture Location)

Ivan is being recognized for his contributions in transforming shake-and-bake metallurgy into a precise, nano-scale science. The award also recognizes his ability to present difficult concepts to both experts and lay people with excitement and humor. Schuller was the star of UCSD-TV's award-winning documentary "When Things Get Small" about nanoscience.

In addition to playing a wacky version of himself in that documentary, Schuller is a fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the Chilean, Spanish and Belgian Academies of Sciences. He has won many awards, including the American Physical Society's Wheatley and Adler Awards, the German von Humbold prize, the Materials Research Society Medal and the Department of Energy's Lawrence Award. He also recently received a Doctor Honoris Causa from the oldest and largest university in Spain, Universidad Complutense. He has published more than 450 technical papers and patents, has given more than 250 invited lectures at international conferences and is one of the 100 most-cited physicists worldwide, out of 500,000, in the last 15 years.

The Academic Senate Faculty Research Lecturer Award was established in 1982 and started recognizing faculty for the 1983 academic year. At that time, the award went to one faculty member each year. In 1996, the senate decided to recognize two faculty members per year. Past recipients include Roger Tsien, Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, David Noel Freedman and Elizabeth Barrett-Connor, among more than 20 others.

"OSA fellows are involved in the most innovative advances in optics and photonics today," said OSA President Thomas Baer. "Now more than ever, the achievements of these leaders in industry, academia, and government are not only benefiting others in the field of photonics, but also broader critical areas like medicine, alternative energy and the environment. On behalf of OSA, I am very pleased to acknowledge Lu's outstanding contributions and honor him with this well-deserved distinction."

This year's fellows represent the best and brightest in optics and photonics from all over the world with more than half of the chosen fellows hailing from outside of the United States.

Astronomers believe the magnetic fields within our own Milky Way and other nearby galaxies--which control the rate of star formation and the dynamics of interstellar gas--arose from a slow "dynamo effect." In this process, slowly rotating galaxies are thought to have generated magnetic fields that grew very gradually as they evolved over 5 billion to 10 billion years to their current levels.

But in the October 2 issue of Nature, the astronomers report that the magnetic field they measured in this distant "protogalaxy" is at least 10 times greater than the average value in the Milky Way.

"This was a complete surprise," said Arthur Wolfe, a professor of physics at UC San Diego's Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences who headed the team. "The magnetic field we measured is at least an order of magnitude larger than the average value of the magnetic field detected in our own galaxy."

"I have never in my life seen my field attract so much attention," he said with amazement on his way to the airport for his 20-hour flight to Geneva.

Wuerthwein is one of 24 UCSD physicists involved in the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, which this month begins the long-awaited quest to find the Higgs boson, a hypothetical particle that physicists hope will allow them to finally tie together the fundamental forces and particles in nature into one grand theory. It is the world's largest experiment, 15 years in the making and involving an estimated 10,000 individuals from 60 countries, including more than 1,700 scientists and engineers from 94 U.S. universities and laboratories.

Since 1994, UCSD physicists have been shuttling between La Jolla and Geneva during their sabbaticals and teaching breaks to work on one of the European collider's two big particle detectors--the Compact Muon Solenoid, or CMS. Make that a gigantic particle detector.

"The CMS detector is 15 meters in diameter and weighs around the same as 30 jumbo jets or 2,500 African elephants," said Vivek Sharma, a professor of physics who participated in the LHC's historic grand opening. "And though it is the size of a cathedral, it contains detectors as precise as Swiss watches."

The award was made to a group of physicists, chemists and mathematicians in UCSD's Division of Physical Sciences, in collaboration with a theoretical neuroscience group at the nearby Salk Institute for Biological Sciences. Using theoretical machinery from quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics, researchers at the center are demonstrating how physics can help scientists understand the complexity of biological systems, from proteins and DNA to cells and genetic networks to organisms and diseases.

The Center for Theoretical Biological Physics is one of nine NSF Physics Frontier Centers designed to foster aggressive and forward-looking research with the potential to lead to fundamental advances in physics.

Continue Full Story...

The students attended a weekly seminar in which they were exposed to all research areas in our Department. One such seminar was on the Physics of Sailing offered by Hans Paar. The seminar had a laboratory component that took place on the San Diego Bay and the Pacific Ocean. The photo shows some of the students in action.

The REU program is sponsored by the National Science Foundation with Dmitri Basov PI and Hans Paar co-PI. The support from faculty and staff was greatly appreciated by all concerned.

The committee selected two students to share the Malmberg Award, Alex Dooraghi and Agnieszka Cieplak, while Brice Dorman is the recipient of the Ma Award. Each of the students will receive a certificate and cash award of $750.

All three students have very high grades in their studies and have worked very hard to achieve this honor. Brice and Alex have only A+ and A grades in the Physics major courses while Agnieszka has excelled in experimental astrophysics.

Dr. Wolfe has made major contributions in several areas of astronomy. Along with Rainer Sachs, he predicted the Sachs-Wolfe Effect, a phenomenon which forms the basis for modern precision cosmology using the background radio emission left over from the Big Bang. In the 1970s, he discovered that light emitted by very distant galaxies is absorbed by hydrogen atoms in previously-undetected intervening gas clouds. From the 1980s until the present, he used optical light emitted by distant quasars to show that these clouds are the progenitors of stars found in modern galaxies. This phenomenon has since been used extensively to study the production of heavy elements and history of star formation in the Universe. He also did landmark research on whether the fundamental constants of nature, such as the charge of the electron and the masses of elementary particles, do, in fact, remain constant through cosmological time.

Dr. Wolfe was the Director of the Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences at UCSD from 1997 to 2007. He joined UCSD as a Professor of Physics and Astronomy in 1989, leaving the University of Pittsburgh, where he had taught since 1973. He holds the Chancellor's Associates Chair of Physics at UCSD. Dr. Wolfe received his Ph.D from the University of Texas at Austin. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and received the Sackler Fellowship of the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge, UK, in 2004.

As Jansky Lecturer, Wolfe will give a presentation entitled, Finding the Gas that Makes Galaxies, at NRAO facilities in Charlottesville, Virginia, Green Bank, West Virginia, and Socorro, New Mexico. The dates of these scientific lectures, which are open to the public, will be announced later.

This is the forty-third Jansky Lectureship. First awarded in 1966, it is named in honor of the man who, in 1932, first detected radio waves from a cosmic source. Karl Jansky's discovery of radio waves from the central region of the Milky Way started the science of radio astronomy. Other recipients of the Jansky award include five Nobel laureates (Drs. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Arno Penzias, Robert Wilson, William Fowler, and Joseph Taylor) as well as Jocelyn Bell-Burnell, discoverer of the first pulsar, and Vera Rubin, discoverer of dark matter in galaxies.

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.

Complete Story

This is the first year of this very selective award, and only 534 out of our 42,000 active referees have been chosen. In subsequent years, they intend to add about 130 more each year to the list of "Outstanding Referees." The awardees chosen are truly exceptional in their contributions to the physics community by their hard work and careful attention to the peer review process. These faculty members are to be congratulated.

The complete list of 534 awardees and other information about the award can be found at http://publish.aps.org/OutstandingReferees. The APS wishes to thank these awardees, for their exceptional work as anonymous referees in service to the international physics community.

They provided two of the four measurements mentioned in number 7 on the list:

Given that the Tevatron involves about 1500 physicists across two competing experiments from many countries worldwide, it is remarkable that a group of 6 people from UCSD were responsible for 50% of the recognized results while the other two measurements were completed by small armies of people from both experiments.

The two postdocs and one graduate student who were the primary drivers of this work have all obtained prestigous appointments:

• Mark Neubauer joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an Assistant Professor last summer;
• Elliot Lipeles is joining the University of Pennsylvania as an Assistant Professor in July 2008; and
• Shih-Chieh Hsu has accepted a Chamberlain Fellowship at UC Berkeley, starting May 2008.

Two other UCSD students (Matt Norman, a 5th year Physics graduate student, and Rami Vanguri, an undergraduate Physics major) also participated in the research described above.

Professor Wuerthwein's group is now pushing out a number of other measurements, including the world's most sensitive Higgs search (Physical Review Letters in preparation). The group operates such that Rami, their undergraduate student, has the opportunity to contribute meaningfully to three papers, one of which was the WZ observation. For the two papers still in preparation, Rami is the primary author. Similarly, Matt has another paper in preparation for which he is the primary author, and there is one more paper in preparation for which Matt and Elliot are the primary authors.

The listings can be found at: http://www.aip.org/pnu/2007/split/850-1.html

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The survey ranked discrete mathematics and combinations at UCSD 4th in the nation, plasma physics 7th, biochemistry 9th, condensed matter physics 10th, geometry and topology 15th, physics 16th , chemistry 20th and mathematics 24th.

Information on how the magazine ranked other programs at UC San Diego can be obtained at: http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/general/03-08UCSDReceiveHighRanks.asp#

Dr. Dery, now an assistant professor in ECE, University of Rochester, did this work in Professor Lu Sham's group at UCSD from 2004 to 2007. This was part of the collaborative work on the theory of spintronics with Dr. Lukasz Cywinski (Ph.D. 2007), Mr. Parin Dalal (current graduate student), and Professor Sham.

The basic component of the theory is a three terminal device with three small magnet bars over a semiconductor. The strength of an electric current from one bar to another through the semiconductor should be strong when the two magnets point in the same direction and weak in opposite directions. When the medium is a metal, this constitutes the "giant magnetoresistance effect" (the subject of the Nobel Prize in Physics this year). But the large conductivity difference between the semiconductor medium and the magnet bars reduces the current differential to insignificance. Yet, semiconductor has the potential for electronics functions which metal would not possess. Calculation shows that in the semiconductor medium the magnet bars create a large difference between electrons of two difference spin directions. A third magnet bar can be made to manifest the current or voltage difference of the relative magnetic directions of the first two. Thus, the three terminal system is a basic spin transistor with a non-volatile memory carried by two of the magnets. The spin-dependent current amplification of the three terminal device has been demonstrated by Lei Zhu and Ed Yu at ECE, UCSD and by D. Saha,M. Holub, and P. Bhattacharyaat ECE, University of Michigan.

An addition of another pair of magnets carrying a second bit of information makes the five terminal device a spin-based logic gate. A circuit is then designed to cascade the information to a whole tree of similar spin gates. The work was published in Nature in 2007. This provides a vision of spin-based electronics with the potential to supplement and to supplant the current CMOS technology.

The Sloan Research Fellowships support the work of exceptional young researchers early in their academic careers, and often at pivotal stages in their work," says Paul L. Joskow, President of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The Sloan Research Fellowships have been awarded since 1955. Wu is studying novel phases and properties in various fields of condensed matter physics, including metal-insulator transitions, magnetism and superconductivity, and quantum computation.

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The overall aim of the project is to quantitatively study three distinct and sequential stages of chemotaxis using an approach that integrates novel experiments and mathematical modeling. These stages include the initial directional sensing process during which several key signaling components localize subcellularly, cell polarity which leads to clearly distinguishable fronts, backs and sides of a cell and motility which includes actual cell movement.

Experiments performed as part of the project will rely heavily on the use of microfluidic devices, which consist of tiny canals on a microchip. Microfluidic devices will provide precise control over the chemoattractant stimulus--the chemicals that attract cells. The goal of the research is to better understand chemotaxis of eukaryotic cells. Advances in this field will benefit diagnosis and treatment of medical problems involving cell migration.

The grant also includes a subcontract to a microfluidics group at Cornell University (Carl Franck and Eberhard Bodenschatz).

Brian G. Keating, an assistant professor of physics, and Katerina Akassoglou, an assistant professor of pharmacology, were among this year's recipients of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers. They were given their awards, which consists of up to five years of research funding, at a White House ceremony today by John H. Marburger III, President Bush's science adviser and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Established in 1996, the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers recognizes outstanding scientists and engineers who, early in their careers, show exceptional potential for leadership at the frontiers of knowledge. The award is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on scientists and engineers beginning their independent careers. Nine federal departments and agencies annually nominate scientists and engineers who are at the start of their independent careers and whose work shows exceptional promise.

"These scientists and engineers have not only brought transformational ideas to their fields of study, they have also enriched the educational environment, especially in their roles as mentors," said Kathie L. Olsen, deputy director of the National Science Foundation.

Keating, who was nominated by the science foundation, is an astrophysicist at UCSD's Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences who is one of the leaders of a collaboration building a telescope and observatory, called POLARBEAR, that will allow physicists for the first time to measure the "gravitational waves" that emanated from the universe during the first moments of its creation.

Katerina Akassoglou Akassoglou, who was nominated by the National Institutes of Health, is a researcher whose work involves molecular and cellular mechanisms that regulate nervous tissue regeneration. In 2007, her lab identified a receptor that is critical in liver regeneration. Her team also discovered that fibrinogen, a protein found in circulating blood and important in blood clotting, can promote multiple sclerosis when it leaks from the blood into the brain, triggering inflammation that leads to MS-related nerve damage.

"The implications of the research derived from this telescope will be unique and far-reaching," said Hans Paar, a UC San Diego professor of physics working on the project. "Our findings will capture the birth of the universe, providing a deeper understanding of one of the most compelling questions in all of science: How did our universe begin?"

After learning about the historic initiative and an initial $400,000 contribution from the James B. Ax Family Foundation to support the project, an anonymous donor gave UC San Diego's Divison of Physical Sciences the remaining $600,000 to advance the new research endeavor. Together, the two donations provide the funding needed to begin construction of the telescope for the project, dubbed "POLARBEAR" for Polarization of Background Radiation. Scientists from UC San Diego, UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Colorado are collaborating on the project, along with several researchers from universities in Canada, Britain and France. The telescope will initially be located at a University of California research facility in the Inyo Mountains, east of the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range near Bishop, California.

The telescope will allow scientists to probe a previously unexplored epoch of the universe, according to Brian Keating, an assistant professor of physics at UCSD and leading collaborator on the project. "The POLARBEAR project is a daring one," added Paar. "We are pushing the limits of what is possible and that is how progress is made."

For more information, please visit the POLARBEAR Telescope website: http://physics.ucsd.edu/~bkeating/polarbear.htm.

Media Contact: Jade Berggren, 858-822-5309

Discovery May Pave the Way for a New Class of Diabetes Drugs
A multidisciplinary team led by researchers at the University of California, San Diego has determined the structure of a protein found in cells that shows potential as a target for the development of new drugs to treat diabetes.

The structural determination effort was led by Mark Paddock in the Department of Physics and Patricia Jennings in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

Full Article: http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/08-07MitoNEETSS-.asp
Media Contact: Sherry Seethaler, (858) 534-4656

The International Union of Materials Research Societies presents the award biennially "for the most significant research on real materials conducted by an interactive group or team whose members are drawn from at least two continents."

The award is named in honor of Shigeyuki Sômiya, an emeritus professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. In addition to an award commemorating the occasion, the recipients receive free registration to the IUMRS International Conference on Advanced Materials. The winners also make a presentation at the conference.

The study, published August 6 in the on-line edition of the journal Physical Review Letters, extended Ulam's conjecture to the level of quantum objects. Ulam's conjecture, proposed in 1956 by American mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, is routinely used to guide spacecraft through the solar system by exploiting gravity. The researchers say that their calculations will make it possible to more precisely steer molecules using photons-or particles-of light.

A minimal series of energy expenditures can be used to transfer an object from one point to another more quickly than by spontaneous motion, according to Ulam's conjecture, because of certain characteristics of chaotic motion. To move spacecraft, that energy can come from the gravitational pull of celestial bodies.

Researchers already use light to guide molecules, just as gravity is used to steer spacecraft in the solar system. For example, they use laser tweezers to trap and probe particles, including individual atoms. However, there was previously no way, other than trial and error, to know how much light energy was needed to move a molecule from one state to the next, or to determine how the amount of light energy needed changed as the complexity of the molecules changed.

"We can wait for the best possible moment to use the least amount of energy," Gruebele said. "What we have is a fast and accurate method for computing the most efficient way of steering a quantum system between two specified states."

Additional information at: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, College of Engineering

The Physics Department's REU program is funded with a Grant by the NSF with Dmitri Basov and Hans Paar as co-PIs and Patti Hey as chief administrator (thanks Patti). The students are embedded in research groups within the Physics Department where they learn first-hand about research in an academic setting.

Wolynes was cited for his "seminal work in areas as diverse as ion solvation dynamics, chemical reactions in condensed phases, the subtleties of quantum energy flow, the puzzles of glasses and the glass transition, and the vast challenges of biopolymers and protein folding and function."

The Council of the Royal Society generates a list of the strongest candidates who have been nominated by two Fellows of the Royal Society. Candidates are selected if they receive a two-thirds vote of fellows attending the Annual Meeting for the Election of Fellows. Wolynes and the eight other fellows selected this year will be formally admitted to the Society at a formal Admissions Day ceremony in July.

The award will be presented on August 1 at the 2007 Denver X-ray conference. Sinha is only the twelfth person to receive the award, which is presented biennially. It consists of $1,000 and a recognition plaque.

Sinha's research involves examining the structure and dynamics of polymer films and other novel liquids using X-ray and neutron scattering. He also studies novel magnetic and superconducting materials to understand how their chemical structure affects their magnetic and transport properties.

Founded in 1652, the Leopoldina is the "world's oldest academy involved in the natural sciences that has been permanently in existence." The number of members is limited to 1,000 total in 28 subject sections. Wolynes will belong to the subsection of Theoretical Physics.

Wolynes has developed the leading theory of how proteins fold, which has led to computer algorithms that allow one to predict the three-dimensional structure of a protein from its amino acid sequence. His work on the theory of energy landscapes has also impacted condensed matter physics, notably illuminating the nature of glasses and liquids.

Randy Kelley is a third year graduate student in the physics department at UCSD. His current research, with his thesis advisor Professor Aneesh Manohar, is on the production of W and Z Bosons at the LHC using soft collinear effective theories.

Randy Kelley is well known in the UCSD community for his brilliant teaching of the undergraduates. He obtained his B.S. in physics from the University of Virginia and before joining UCSD, he was a Lieutenant in the US Navy where he served as a nuclear engineering officer onboard the USS John C Stennis.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, the $40,000 fellowship award provides young theorists selected in a national competition with funds to underwrite the costs of their research, including travel and computing needs.

"The goal of these fellowships is to stimulate the work of theoretical physicists who will help interpret the treasure trove of data that will emerge from the Large Hadron Collider" said Jonathan Bagger, a leader of the LHC Theory Initiative. "Our initiative will help the high-energy physics community take full advantage of the LHC."

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics in Geneva, Switzerland, is expected to begin operation late this year. With its unprecedented energy and luminosity, the LHC promises to revolutionize particle physics and our understanding of the universe. It is expected to create new forms of matter as scientists search for the elusive Higgs boson and a host of new particles, as well as help answer some of the most fundamental questions of physics.

Prof. Ruderman is a distinguished theoretical astrophysicist who pioneered the science of neutron stars and pulsars; he has also contributed to elementary particle physics and to understanding of the earth's atmosphere. He has worked intensively on problems associated with collapsed objects in astrophysics, especially neutron stars. Recent work has focused on how neutron stars convert so much of their initial spin-energy into beams of high energy radiation. Prof. Ruderman received his PhD. from Cal Tech in 1951. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1972 and to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1974.

Talk Abstract: Forty years after the discovery of the first pulsars important questions still remain about the structure and dynamics of these strongly magnetized, rapidly spinning neutron stars. Expected properties and observable phenomena will be presented for a "standard model" of them. It assumes a near solar mass core of superfluid neutrons, superconducting protons and very relativistic degenerate electrons, all enclosed by a thin solid metal crust. The model describes a distinctive evolution of neutron star magnetic fields during prolonged stellar spin-down (or spin-up) and, associated with it, two families of sudden jumps in the star's spin-down torque and spin-rate. Model expectations are consistent with observations. However, understanding other kinds of observations, commonly interpreted as evidence for very long period neutron star precession, and also presumed thermal x-ray emission from the stellar surface, raise problems for this standard model. Other interpretations of these observations will be suggested.

The Physics Department Memorial Lecture series was organized in memory of Prof. Norman M. Kroll, a pioneer in quantum physics and a founding member of the UCSD Physics department. During his forty year career at UCSD, Prof. Kroll made brilliant contributions to research in quantum electrodynamics, atomic physics, particle physics, free electron lasers and subatomic particle accelerators.

This lecture is generously supported by financial contributions from the Kroll family and friends, the Department of Physics, and the Institute of Physics & Applied Physical Sciences. The event is free and open to the public.

The Institute of Low Temperature and Structure Research was established in 1966 and is named after Professor W. Trzebiatowski, who played a key role in the establishment of the Institute, served as its first Director, and later became the President of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Professor Trzebiatowski is known for the discovery in 1952 of ferromagnetism in uranium hydride UH3. This came as a great surprise since metallic uranium was known to be completely nonmagnetic and, at that time, ferromagnetic ordering had only been found in metals and alloys of the iron group, as well as in gadolinium, one of the rare earth metals.

Professor Maple has collaborated with researchers at the W. Trzebiatowski Institute since 1976 and coauthored eight joint papers. His most recent projects with the Institute concern the nonmagnetic Kondo effect in actinides and the physics of strongly correlated electron behavior in lanthanide and actinide filled skutterudite arsenide compounds.

On behalf of the department, I extend to Geoffrey our congratulations as a recipient of this award from the National Academy of Sciences.

The citation, which will appear on the Fellowship Certificate, will read as follows:

"For her contributions to the understanding of the realization of flavor and spin symmetries for Baryons, through innovative application of the large Nc expansion."

The citation will be published in the March 2007 issue of APS News as well as appear on the Fellowship Page of the APS Home Page. The presentation of the certificate will be at the divisional annual meeting.

George Feher, a research professor at UCSD, will share the $100,000 prize with Ada Yonath of Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science" for ingenious structural discoveries of the ribosomal machinery of peptide-bond formation and the light-driven primary processes in photosynthesis." The award will be presented to the two scientists by the President of Israel at a formal ceremony at the Knesset, or parliament, in Jerusalem, on May 13.

Full Story

http://www.fnal.gov/pub/today/archive_2006/today06-11-16.html

From the Article:

"The mediators of the weak interaction, the massive W and Z gauge bosons, are readily produced at the Tevatron and have been studied extensively by the CDF and DZero experiments. But producing pairs of heavy gauge bosons is far more rare. While one W boson is produced in every 3 million Tevatron collisions, and one Z boson in every 10 million, WZ pairs are produced only once per 20 billion events. Facing these odds, it is no wonder that WZ has never been observed--that is, until now. The elusive WZ has finally been netted at CDF. We found it by searching for WZ production in its most easily observable signature, where 3 charged leptons are produced along with missing energy from a neutrino. CDF observed 16 of these signatures, and about 13 of them are expected to be WZ events. If WZ production was not actually happening in the Tevatron, the probability of getting this result would only be 2 in a billion. This indicates that our results are significant; and we have, in fact, observed WZ production. Finding the WZ pair is important because it teaches us about how gauge bosons interact with each other, and it confirms Standard Model predictions. Observing such a rare process at CDF also represents an important experimental milestone in our pursuit of the Higgs particle and new physics at the Tevatron. We look forward to a bright future as we continue to collect data from Run II!"

UCSD Physicist Lu J. Sham was awarded a Doctorate, honoris causa, from National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan, in June 2006. The citation in the certificate, honoris causa, reads "For his broad research contributions, including the quantum theory of molecules and solids, particularly, the co-founding of the Density Functional Theory, which has far reaching influence on computational physics and chemistry, and solid state quantum information and computation, particularly the optical control of spin interaction, which opens up another influential area."

National Chaio Tung University is in Hsinchu, Taiwan, the heart of the semiconductor industry, especially III-V compounds. The university is a powerhouse in telecommunications and optoelectronics.

The Department of Physics is pleased to announce the winners of this year's Ma and Malmberg awards, our department's awards to the top undergraduate physics majors.

This years Ma award goes to Ethan Brown and the Malmberg award goes to Matthew Bibee. In addition to stellar GPAs, Ethan had 5 A+ grades in upper division physics courses and Matthew had 6, truly outstanding records. Both will be going to graduate school this September, and have bright futures ahead of them. Ethan will be working on his PH.D. in physics at UCLA, and Matthew will be at Stanford in the Applied Physics Ph.D. program.

Congratulations and best wishes to Ethan and Matthew!

Kevin A. McCarthy, a senior who has worked hard to maintain a high standard of academic excellence in his classwork with a double major in Physics (BS) and Electrical Engineering (BS) at UCSD, has been named recipient of the 2006 Selma and Robert Silagi Award for undergraduate excellence in science by the Division of Physical Sciences at UCSD.

An award luncheon held on June 1, 2006 at the UCSD Faculty Club honored McCarthy where he was presented with a $5,000 award by Dean Mark H. Thiemens on behalf of Laura J. Silagi from Venice, California. Laura Silagi, one of the surviving children of Selma and Robert Silagi, attended the luncheon.

Professor Brian Keating and Professor Thomas Murphy, Jr. have been selected as recipients of the 2006-2007 Hellman Faculty Fellows Award. The Hellman Fellowship Program was established at UCSD in 1995 through the generosity of Chris and Warren Hellman. The program is designed to provide financial support and encouragement to young faculty in the core disciplines who show capacity for great distinction in their research and creative activities. Funds awarded are primarily intended to enhance the individual's progress toward tenure.

Due to the outstanding caliber of the proposals submitted this year, the selection process was quite a challenge. Twenty-three proposals were submitted by Arts & Humanities and Social Sciences faculty, of which eight were selected to receive awards. Seven proposals were selected for funding out of the twenty-three submitted by the Physical Sciences, Life Sciences and Engineering Divisions.

A team led by Physicist Massimiliano Di Ventra at the University of California, San Diego has shown the feasibility of a fast, inexpensive technique to sequence DNA as it passes through tiny pores. The advance brings personalized, genome-based medicine closer to reality.

David R. Smith, a physicist formerly at the University of California, San Diego, has been awarded the European Union's Descartes Prize for Excellence in Scientific Research for developing at UCSD a new class of composite materials with unusual physical properties that scientists theorized might be possible, but had never before been able to produce in nature.

Complete story at http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/mcdescartes.asp

Dr. Shane Walker has been named a UCSD Faculty Fellow for 2005-2007. The Faculty Fellows Program is designed to prepare recent outstanding University of California Ph.D.s for faculty-track careers by providing mentored training and experience in the design and conduct of instructional courses to candidates who demonstrate promise for excellence in both teaching and research. It is a highly competitive program that awards only four or five fellowships per year.

Dr. Walker's research focus is in underwater acoustics, using a combination of applied and theoretical physics to understand details of sound propagation in shallow water environments. His work directly addresses the challenging problem of decoding sonar data in complex, unknown environments in the presence of background noise and reverberations. The ability to "see" much better with sound than has previously been possible can lead to advances in areas as disparate as communications, sea-floor mapping, and environmental biology.

Dr. Walker is an excellent teacher, with a great deal of experience in teaching physics to audiences at all levels. He has participated in "Preparing Future Physics Faculty" (PFPF) for several years, and has been a major contributor to PFPF-led outreach programs. During the term of his Faculty Fellowship, he will concentrate on teaching physics to biology and engineering majors. He will also develop and test interactive classroom demonstrations designed to stimulate student interest in science while improving their ability to learn by helping them to recognize and correct scientific misconceptions.

Shane's Faculty Profile

Professors Margaret Burbidge and Sally Ride were named to Smithsonian Magazine's "35 Innovators of Our Time" in the November 2005 issue. The article marks the 35th anniversary of the magazine by "...revisiting scientists, artists and scholars who've enriched the magazine and our lives."

Brian Keating, assistant professor of physics at UCSD's Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences, won first place and $20,000 in the Young Scholars Competition at the Amazing Light: Visions for Discovery symposium this month at the University of California, Berkeley.

The competition at the conference honoring Nobel laureate Charles Townes' 90th birthday was intended to recognize young scientists from around the world with the potential to make such major breakthroughs as Townes' discovery of the laser.

Keating was selected for his essay and talk on a telescope which he and his colleagues are constructing at the U.S. South Pole Station, Antarctica. Starting in December the telescope will search for primordial gravitational waves produced after the Big Bang and will test the theory of cosmological inflation. Judges for the competition included Townes, Nobel laureate Arno Penzias, planet-finder Geoff Marcy of UC Berkeley and Donald York of the University of Chicago.

More information on the conference and competition can be found at: http://www.foundationalquestions.net/townes/ysc/young_finalists.asp

Kenneth Burch, UCSD Physics student, has been chosen for a GMAG Outstanding Dissertation in Magnetism Award for 2006. The award consists of a cash prize, certificate and invited talk in an appropriate session at the 2006 March meeting in Baltimore.

More information can be found at: http://www.aps.org/units/gmag/

Each year the Physics Department and its faculty host a number of undergraduates in its Research Experience for Undergraduates program. The students are selected from approximately 450 applicants. The program is funded by an NSF Grant (with Dmitri Basov and Hans Paar co-PIs).

Besides working hard in the labs and attending seminars and workshops, the students also take the Physics of Sailing course. The course consists of a classroom lecture and a laboratory component that takes place on the San Diego Bay in a 42' Catalina sailboat. The photograph shows the students, Charmaine Samahin and her husband Randy, and the instructor (Hans Paar).

The Department of Physics is pleased to announce the winners of this year's Ma and Malmberg awards, our department's awards to the top undergraduate physics majors.

This years Ma award goes to Kyle Armour. Kyle is graduating with a GPA of ... ok, university regulations prohibit me from telling you. Let's just say its within epsilon of 4.0, where epsilon is a small number. Also, he garnered 10 A+ grades in physics courses! He has already done significant research in particle physics in Jim Branson's group, and is heading to graduate school at U. Washington where he intends to continue working in particle theory.

The Malmberg award goes to Tyson Kim. Tyson has distinguished himself in our biophysics program, and is the lead author on an applied physics letter (along with David Kleinfeld and Alex Groisman) that is soon to appear. Tyson has not yet decided between biophysics/MD-PhD programs at Harvard, U. San Francisco and UCSD. (We hope he chooses to stay in San Diego!)

Congratulations and best wishes to Tyson and Kyle!

Attribution: Dan Dubin - Vice Chair for Undergraduate Education

Both programs recognize and support outstanding graduate students in the relevant science, technology, and mathematics disciplines. Fellows are expected to become experts who can contribute significantly to research, teaching, and innovations in science and engineering. The CSGF recipients receive payments of all tuition and required fees for up to 4 years of study, a yearly stipend, matching funds for a computer workstation, a yearly academic allowance, and yearly conferences. Among the requirements and benefits are a plan of study which includes course work in Applied Mathematics, Science and Computer Science, and a practicum at a national DOE laboratory. NSF fellows receive tuition, fees, a yearly stipend for up to 3 years of study, with no requirement beyond annual reporting.

Five faculty members at the University of California, San Diego have been named fellows of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the academy has announced. The five are among 196 new fellows and 17 new foreign honorary members in the academy's 225th class.

The new fellows from UCSD are Jack Keil Wolf, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering; Ajit P. Varki, professor of medicine and cellular and molecular medicine; Linda Preiss Rothschild and M. Salah Baouendi, professors of mathematics; and Michael L. Norman, professor of physics.

They join 76 current AAAS fellows on the UCSD faculty.

It gives me great pleasure to welcome these outstanding leaders in their fields, said Academy President Patricia Meyer Spacks. Fellows are selected through a highly competitive process that recognizes individuals who have made preeminent contributions to their disciplines and to society at large.

Fellows and members are nominated and elected by current members, comprising scholars and practitioners from mathematics, physics, biological sciences, humanities and the arts, public affairs and business. The academy will welcome this years fellows and honorary members at its annual induction ceremony on October 8 in Cambridge, Mass.

Full Article

Prof. David Gross, recipient of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics will speak on The Future of Physics in the inaugural lecture of the Physics Department Memorial Lecture series. This event will be held at 4:00 pm on Thursday, April 21 at the Liebow Auditorium in Basic Science Building.

This annual lecture series organized in the memory of Prof. Norman M. Kroll, a brilliant pioneer in Quantum physics and a founding member of the UCSD Physics department. During his forty year career at the UCSD, Professor Kroll made brilliant contributions to research in quantum electrodynamics, atomic physics, particle physics, free electron lasers and subatomic particle accelerators. He served as the chair of the physics department from 1963 to 1965 and from 1983 to 1988. A short description of Prof. Kroll's life is at http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/mckroll.asp

This lecture series is generously supported by the financial contributions from the friends and family of Prof. Norman Kroll. The event is free and open to the public. Parking is $3.

David J. Gross is Director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) and the first incumbent of the Frederick W. Gluck Chair in Theoretical Physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Professor Gross was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for solving, in 1973, the last great remaining problem of what has since come to be called the Standard Model of the quantum mechanical picture of reality and discovered along with his co-recipients how the nucleus of atoms works. This lecture is also a part of the worldwide celebration of 2005 as the year of physics.

http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/thisweek/2005/apr/04_18_kroll.asp

By Kim McDonald | March 7, 2005

The Royal Astronomical Society in England has awarded physics professors Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge the society's Gold Medal, its highest honor, for their contributions to astronomy during more than half a century.

The two astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences are perhaps most well known for their work in the mid-1950s describing how stars synthesize nearly all the chemical elements in the universe, from iron and oxygen to carbon and copper.

The society cited the pair "for their joint contributions to astronomical research and their impressive record of service to the community, including Professor Geoffrey Burbidge's 30-year tenure as editor-in-chief of the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and Professor Margaret Burbidge's Presidency of the American Astronomical Society."

Ivan Schuller is also one of seven winners of the 2004 E.O. Lawrence Award, given for outstanding contributions in the field of atomic energy, broadly defined. Each winner will receive a gold medal, citation and $50,000 at a ceremony in Washington, DC on November 8, 2004.

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San Diego Union Tribune Article

We regret to inform you that our colleague Norman Kroll passed away on Sunday, August 8, 2004. One of UCSD's founding faculty, Norman was a member of the Department of Physics and one of its most distinquished emeriti. He was a brilliant theoretical physicist with deep physical insight and broad scientific interests.

He took an active interest in the Physics Department and served as Department Chair for two terms (1963-66 and 1983-1989). We will miss Norman's keen intellect and wise counsel. The Department will keep you informed of the wishes of Norman's family regarding his memorial.

Prof. Kroll was born in 1922 and was appointed professor in 1962.

Pictures from Norman's 80th Birthday Celebration are available at: Norman Kroll 80th Birthday Celebration

M. Brian Maple, Bernd T. Matthias professor of physics and director of UCSD's Institute for Pure and Applied Physical Sciences, and Charles S. Zuker, a professor of biology and of neurosciences at UCSD, were among the 72 new members and 18 foreign associates from 13 countries elected to the academy this morning in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.

Their election brings the number of current faculty members at UCSD who are members of the National Academy of Sciences to 71, ranking the university seventh in the nation in the number of academy members. The National Academy of Sciences, established by Congress in 1863, serves as an official adviser to the federal government on matters of science and technology.

Mark Thiemens, Dean of UCSD's Division of Physical Sciences, and Eduardo Macagno, Dean of UCSD's Division of Biological Sciences, noted that The election of Professor Maple and Professor Zuker to the academy today is a testament to their scientific achievements and underscores the intellectual vitality of UCSD's two science divisions.

It's often said that Roger Revelle built this university from the top down by recruiting members of the National Academy of Sciences to UCSD. But much of our scientific talent, as demonstrated by the election today, resides in the faculty who have developed and established themselves at UCSD, added the two deans.

Maple received his doctorate in physics from UCSD in 1969, working under the renowned UCSD physicist Bernd Matthias, and was named Distinguished Alumnus of the Year at UCSD in 1987. An expert on high-temperature superconductors materials that lose all resistance to electricity at commercially attainable, cold temperatures he presided over the celebrated high-temperature superconductivity session, dubbed the Woodstock of Physics, during the American Physical Society's March meeting in 1987. His research interests also include magnetism, low-temperature physics, high-pressure physics and surface science. Maple has been on the faculty at UCSD since 1973.

Zuker, a 46-year-old neurobiologist, was born in Chile and moved to the U.S. to obtain his doctorate in molecular biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Zuker is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and has been on the faculty at UCSD since 1987. Recently elected to the Academy of Arts and Sciences, Zuker and his colleagues in his laboratory employ a combined molecular, genetic, and physiological approach to investigate the biology of sensory transduction mechanisms in photoreceptors, mechanoreceptors and taste receptors.

Attribution: Kim McDonaldhttp://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/mcnas.asp

"In recognition of his outstanding career in Elementary Particle Physics, and in particular for his important contributions to the understanding of the decays of heavy quarks."

Background:
Born in Tehran, Iran in 1974, Rahatlou obtained his "Laurea in fisica" (the Italian undergraduate degree) from Universita` degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza" in February 1998, with a thesis on the design and implementation of the simulation software for the central drift chamber of the BaBar experiment, which was under construction at SLAC. He joined UCSD in September 1998 as a graduate student to start his study of CP violation with the BaBar experiment, and received his PhD in October 2002, with a dissertation on the "Observation of matter--anti-matter asymmetry in the B0 meson system". This is the first observation of CP violation since its discovery, in 1964, in the kaon system. He is currently working at UCSD as a post-doc on BaBar. His main research interest is the measurement of the CKM angle gamma of the Unitarity Triangle, which is an important and promising measurement within the next two years at the PEP-II B-factory. He is also in charge of the Reconstruction program of the BaBar experiment.