Recent Awards

Faculty Honors

Physics Professor Homer A. Neal has received the 2003 Edward A. Bouchet Award from the American Physical Society (APS). The award is given annually to promote the participation of under-represented minorities in physics by identifying and recognizing a distinguished minority physicist who has made significant contributions to physics research. Professor Neal was honored “for his significant contributions to experimental high energy physics, for his important role in formulating governmental science policy, for his service as a university administrator at several universities, and for his advocacy of diversity and educational opportunity at all levels.” Neal’s research area is experimental high energy physics and he has led many experiments that have clarified the nature of spin effects in high energy particle interactions. He is currently on a team that is conducting research at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Switzerland.

The American Physical Society recognizes Leonard Sander's 1981 paper with Tom Witten, Diffusion Limited Aggregation, A Kinetic Critical Phenomenon, as the ninth most cited paper in the history of Physical Review Letters.

Physics Professor Gordon Kane was awarded a Collegiate Professorship effective September 2002, for a five-year term. Regents endorsed the request to appoint Gordon L. Kane as the Victor Weisskopf Collegiate Professor of Physics, effective September 1, 2002 through August 31, 2007. Professor Kane gave his inaugural lecture in February entitled, Can We Learn the Ultimate Law(s) of Nature? Are They Supersymmetric?

James Allen, Professor of Physics, received the Frank Isakson Prize at the American Physical Society meeting in Indianapolis. The Isakson is awarded every two years to recognize and encourage contributions to the field of optical effects in solids. The Isakson Prize traditionally goes to researchers in infrared and optical spectroscopy. This is the first time it has been awarded for work employing the techniques used by Allen and his collaborators.

Otto Laporte Professor of Physics Philip Bucksbaum is this year's recipient of the Margaret and Herman Sokol Faculty Award in the Sciences. The Sokol Award is given to a person who has advanced the frontiers of science and who has made significant contributions to excellence in graduate education. In addition to spearheading efforts to create the Center for Ultrafast Optical Sciences and set up the Optical Physics Interdisciplinary Laboratory, Bucksbaum has had a strong influence on the education and training of graduate students and is in great demand to supervise student thesis work. Bucksbaum presented the Sokol Award Lecture on Quantum Control.

Michael Duff, U-M Physics Professor, and Director, Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics is the recipient of the 2001 Oskar Klein Collegiate Professorship. Duff gave this year's inaugural lecture entitled, The World in Eleven Dimensions. He spoke about the current attempts to find a unified theory that would reconcile Einstein's General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, explain all known physical phenomena and invoke the Kaluza-Klein idea of extra spacetime dimensions. The best candidate is M-theory, which lives in eleven dimensions, the maximum allowed by supersymmetry of the elementary particles.

Physics Professor Timothy McKay received the year 2001 Class of 1923 Memorial Teaching Award for outstanding teaching of undergraduates. McKay's dedication to Introductory Physics for honors students in addition to his innovation and success with peer instruction and his introduction of computer-aided physics into the undergraduate curriculum are noteworthy accomplishments that contributed to his winning this award.

Assistant Professor of Physics and Associate Research Scientist in Biophysics Jens-Christian Meiners was selected as an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow. The Sloan Research Fellowship carries with it a grant to be used in a flexible and largely unrestricted manner to provide the most constructive possible support for his research. Meiners will use the grant to study the dynamics of DNA molecules in single-molecule experiments.

Christopher Monroe, Associate Professor, won the 2001 I. I. Rabi Prize in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics for his pivotal experiments that implemented quantum logic using trapped atomic ions, and for his fundamental studies of coherence and decoherence in entangled quantum systems. The Rabi Prize is meant to recognize and encourage outstanding research in Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics by investigators who have held a PhD for 10 years or less.

Christopher Monroe, aslo won the 2000 International Award on Quantum Communications for "outstanding contributions to quantum information science." The International Award on Quantum Communications has been established by the Research Institute of Tamagawa University to acknowledge an individual or a group of individuals for their pioneering contributions to the development of quantum communications.

Physics Professor Homer Neal was awarded the Samuel A. Goudsmit Distinguished University Professor of Physics in recognition of his outstanding research, his leadership within the University and the international scientific community, and his contributions to national science policy.

Physics Professor Martinus J.G. Veltman, the John D. MacArthur Professor Emeritus of Physics and 1999 Nobel Prize in physics winner was named to the National Academy of Sciences. This honor is one of the highest recognitions possible within the physics community.

Additional Awards

The Demonstration Laboratory team, Warren Smith, Mark Kennedy, & Angela Plagemann earned a first and second place award in the AAPT equipment competition last year in Rochester, NY.