Several APS Members Receive Honors

APS members have been honored with a variety of awards recently.

APS fellow Rodolfo Gambini, from the University of the Republic in Uruguay, was awarded the 2004 TWAS (Third World Academy of Sciences) prize in physics. In addition to his research in gauge theory, Gambini has been instrumental in rebuilding Uruguay's physics infrastructure. He founded a society for the promotion of science in Uruguay and has lobbied congress for a national research system.

"It is the first time that a scientist working in Uruguay has received a TWAS Prize. This award, therefore, not only recognizes a personal trajectory, but also the efforts that the national scientific community has made for the development of science in our country," Gambini said in a press release.

The TWAS Prizes for 2003 were announced on October 16, 2003, in Beijing, and will be presented at the next General Meeting of TWAS, scheduled to take place in Trieste, Italy, in November 2004.

APS Fellow Rangaswamy Srinivasan, of UV Tech Associates, formerly at IBM Research, was awarded the 2003-2004 AIP Prize for the Industrial Applications of Physics. The citation reads "for discoveries, inventions, and promotion of ablative photodecomposition for medical and materials applications."

Srinivasan was born in India in 1929 and came to the US in 1953 for his PhD at the University of Southern California. Srinivasan's discovery, a heatless laser surgery, has boomed into what's commonly known as LASIK. His invention of the method of lasers etching organic substances has also led to advances in communications.

The award, which is sponsored by the General Motors Corporation and AIP Corporate Associates, was presented at the 2003 AIP Industrial Physics Forum on October 27 in San Jose, California. Srinivasan also described his award-winning research at the 2004 APS March Meeting.

Constantino Tsallis, of the Brazilian Center for Research in Physics, in Rio de Janeiro, was awarded the Mexico Prize for Science and Technology for 2003. The prize was created in 1990 to recognize scientific and technological research conducted in Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain, and Portugal, and encourage links between those scientific communities and Mexico. It comes with $40,000 and is presented in a ceremony by the president of Mexico. This is the third time the prize has been given to a physicist. Tsallis was honored for his research in statistical mechanics.

Also, the APS topical group on magnetism has announced its first Outstanding Dissertation in Magnetism Awards. The three recipients were:

—Gonzalo Alvarez, a student at Florida State University working with Elbio Dagotto, "Computational Studies of Diluted Magnetic Semiconductors and Other Materials,"

—Xin Jiang, a student at Stanford University working with Stuart Parkin, "Tunnel spin injectors for semiconductor spintronics,"

—Owen Vajk, a student at Stanford University working with Martin Greven, "Quantum impurities in a two-dimensional antiferromagnet." Alvarez, Jiang, and Vajk gave invited talks on their work at the APS March Meeting, where they were presented with their awards of $500.