Alycia
Weinberger
of DTM was awarded the Vainu Bappu Gold Medal of the Astronomical
Society of India for the year 2000. The award, granted every two
years, honors exceptional contributions in the field of astronomy
and astrophysics by a young scientist not yet 36. It is named in
memory of M. K. Vainu Bappu, founding president of the Astronomical
Society of India and past president of the International Astronomical
Union. Alycia will share the award with Biswajit Paul, an X-ray
astronomer at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai,
India. |
Gerd Steinle – Neumann, a current Carnegie Fellow,
was awarded the Ralph B. Baldwin Prize in Astrophysics and Space Sciences
from U. Michigan for his thesis. He will present a lecture and receive
the award on Oct. 1 in Ann Arbor.
—
Wim Van Westrenen also left in Aug. for a postdoctoral
fellowship at the ETH Zürich in the high-pressure research group
led by Max Schmidt and Peter Ulmer (former GL postdoc).
Van Westrenen will be joining his wife, former Visiting Investigator Fraukje
Brouwer (ETH Zürich), who returned to Switzerland in Feb.
—
Heather Watson (Dept. of Earth and Environmental Science,
RPI) has been appointed a predoctoral fellow with Yingwei Fei. She is
studying the siderophile element diffusion in the Fe-Ni system at high
pressure and temperature.
—
Matthew Wooller has accepted a position as assistant
professor (Stable Isotope Biogeochemist) at U. Alaska-Fairbanks. Working
in Marilyn Fogel’s lab, he patented a device called variously the
Woollerizer, Wooller-matic, or Wooller device.
—
Shuangmeng Zhai, former predoctoral fellow in Fei’s
laboratory, has returned to China to continue at the Dept. of Earth Sciences,
Zhejiang U. He worked with Fei on the role of alumina and ferric iron
in mantle minerals at high pressure.
—
Quinn Roberts will leave her job as a lab technician
in Marilyn Fogel’s laboratory to enter a Ph.D. program in marine
science at U. Southern California. Diane O'Brien (Ph.D.,
Princeton U.), who worked with Fogel as a visiting research scientist
last year, will return this fall as a Visiting Investigator. Smithsonian-Carnegie
intern Denise Akob worked in Fogel’s lab this summer.
Felicitas (Lizzi) Wiedemann, from George Washington U.,
is working on her dissertation in the Fogel laboratory. Other visitors
to the Fogel lab this fall include Melissa Southwell
(U. North Carolina) and Valery Terwilliger (U. Kansas).
—
John Robert Thomas, who worked as an instrument maker
at GL from 1951 to1970, died Aug. 8 in Washington, DC.
Terrestrial Magnetism
The Meteoritical Society announced that the 2003 Alfred O. Nier Prize
will go to Steven Desch, a Carnegie Fellow and NASA
Astrobiology Institute Fellow. The prize, which honors the memory of
Alfred Nier, is given annually “for a significant contribution
in the field of meteoritics and closely allied fields of research.”
The recipient must be younger than 35. Desch will receive the prize
at the next annual meeting of the society, in Münster, Germany.
Larry Nittler received this same prize last year at the society's meeting
in Rome.
—
Vera Rubin received an honorary Doctor of Science degree
from Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa, at its May commencement.
|
Larry Nittler was honored in July by having an asteroid
named for him. Asteroid 5992 Nittler was discovered in1981, has a perihelion
distance of 2.45AU, and is estimated to be 6 to 12 km in diameter.
—
Alan Boss was named a fellow of the Meteoritical Society
at the Los Angeles meeting, also attended by Steven Desch and Larry
Nittler. He was also appointed an editor for the new Cambridge University
Press astrobiology series of monographs. Boss chaired a panel discussion
on naming very low mass objects at IAU Symposium 211: Brown Dwarfs,
in Waikoloa, HI, in May. He also presented his models of the formation
of planetary-mass brown dwarfs and gave a series of five lectures on
planet formation for a summer school at the National Observatory in
Rio de Janeiro in July.
—
Former DTM Fellow Mizuho Ishida (1982-1983) was awarded
the Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon at the spring 2002 meeting of
the Japan Seismological Society. She is director of earth science research,
National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention,
Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan.
—
Prof. Hiromu Okada (Hokkaido U.), who worked with Selwyn
Sacks as a predoctoral research associate from 1971 to1974, was commended
at a special ceremony by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi for his activities
at the time of the disasters caused by the eruption of Mount Usu in
2000. Prof. Okada was the first individual since 1984 to receive this
honor.
Sara Seager joined
the DTM scientific staff in August. |
Sara Seager joined the scientific staff in early Aug.
She received her Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard in 1999 and then joined
the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Her research is twofold—cosmology
and extrasolar planets. In her extrasolar planets research, she develops
models characterizing the atmospheres of extrasolar planets, collaborating
with both theoretical and observational groups. In addition,she is co-leading
a search for short-period transiting extrasolar planets. In cosmology,
she studies what happened in the early universe when electrons and protons
combined to form hydrogen and helium.
—
Sean Solomon chaired a meeting in June of the Advisory
Committee to the Institute of Earth Sciences, Academia Sinica of Taiwan.
Typhoon Lee, former member of the DTM research staff, is the director
of the institute.
—
Carnegie Fellow Aki Roberge arrived in July after completing
her Ph.D. in astrophysics at Johns Hopkins U., where she studied UV
spectroscopy of circumstellar (CS) disks around young stars. She works
with the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) spacecraft and
the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) on the Hubble Space
Telescope to determine the abundances of several gaseous species in
CS disks and their relationship to disk evolution. At DTM, she is planning
a range of CS disk observations across a broad wavelength band.
—
Carnegie Fellow Mark Behn arrived in Aug. after completing
his Ph.D. in marine geology and geophysics at MIT/WHOI. His research
focuses on the characteristics of faulting along mid-ocean ridges and
their implications for the mechanical structure of oceanic crust and
lithosphere.
—
Carnegie Fellow Ambre Luguet arrived in early Sept.
A geochemist, Luguet obtained her Ph.D. in 2000 at the Muséum
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