APS News

October 2005 (Volume 14, Number 9)

APS Members Elect Kadanoff, Bienenstock to Presidential Line

APS members elected Leo Kadanoff, professor emeritus, at the University of Chicago as president-elect, and Arthur Bienenstock of Stanford University as APS vice-president in the 2005 general election. The two men will assume these offices on January 1, 2006. Because of the death of former APS president-elect John Bahcall in August (see related story), Kadanoff immediately becomes APS vice-president, while vice-president John Hopfield of Princeton moves up to become president-elect. Hopfield will become APS president in 2006, succeeding current President Marvin Cohen, to be followed by Kadanoff in 2007 and Bienenstock in 2008.

Leo P. Kadanoff
Leo P. Kadanoff
Arthur Bienenstock
Arthur Bienenstock

In other election results, Margaret Murnane of the University of Colorado/JILA was elected chair-elect of the APS Nominating Committee, which is responsible for proposing a slate of candidates each year for the Society's general election. Christina Back (General Atomics) and the University of Maryland’s Wendell Hill were elected as general councilors, while Albrecht Wagner of DESY and the Univesity of Hamburg (Germany) will be the Society’s new international councilor.

Kadanoff received his PhD from Harvard in physics, and followed up with a postdoc in Copenhagen. He taught at the University of Illinois (1962-1969), Brown University (1969-1978), and then moved to the University of Chicago. He has served as vice-president of the Urbana Chapter of the NAACP, as a member of both the Board of Governors of Argonne National Laboratory and the Board of Physics and Astronomy of the National Research Council (US), and twice as Director of the University of Chicago Materials Lab. Kadanoff has won the APS Buckley and Onsager Prizes, the National Medal of Science (US), and la Grande Médaille d’Or of the French Academy of Sciences. His theoretical work has focused on condensed matter and statistical physics, and he helped establish the scaling and universality basis of phase transition theory.

Bienenstock received his PhD in applied physics from Harvard in 1962. After an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship, he joined Harvard’s Division of Engineering and Applied Physics in 1963. He joined Stanford University’s Materials Science and Applied Physics Departments in 1967. In 1978, he took on the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory directorship. In November, 1997 he was confirmed as the Associate Director for Science of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and remained in that position until 2001. Bienenstock served as an APS general councilor, on the APS Committee on Applications of Physics, on the Audit Committee, on the Panel on Public Affairs, and as chair of the Ethics Committee.

Murnane is a Fellow of JILA and is a member of the faculty in the Department of Physics at the University of Colorado. She received her PhD degree in physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1989. She remained at Berkeley for one year as a postdoctoral fellow, before joining the faculty at Washington State University in 1990. In 1996, Murnane moved to the University of Michigan, and in 1999 she moved to the University of Colorado. She served as Chair of the APS Committee on the Status of Women in Physics in 2004, and currently coordinates the CSWP Site Visit program. She has served on the APS Council and Executive Committees, as well as on the Executive Committees of the APS Divisions of Laser Science and Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics.

Back is an experimental physicist with expertise in the study of radiation in high energy density plasmas. She earned her PhD in plasma physics from the University of Florida in 1989. Following her PhD she worked in France at the Ecole Polytechnique for two years. In 1992 she joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. This year, she became the Center Head of High Energy Density Physics Targets and Research at General Atomics. Back currently serves on the APS Division of Plasma Physics Executive Committee.

Hill holds the rank of Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, with appointments in the Institute for Physical Science and Technology and the Department of Physics. He received a PhD in physics from Stanford University in 1980. He is a guest worker at NIST, where he was a postdoc before joining the faculty of the University of Maryland in 1982. His current investigations center on ultrafast dynamics, coherent control, strong-field laser-matter interaction, atom optics and quantum information. He leads the first group to combine ultrashort pulses and coincidence imaging with position-sensitive detectors to extract correlated ejection details previously not possible. Most recently, his group has demonstrated an all-optical atom switch to transfer atoms between two different guides. Hill was a member of the Executive Committee of the APS Division of Laser Science, the APS Committee on Minorities, and chaired the Nomination Committee for the APS Division of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics.

Wagner received his doctoral degree in physics in 1971 from Heidelberg University with work done on an experiment at CERN. He worked from 1973 to 1974 at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He did research from 1975 until 1986 at DESY, and from 1986 until 1999 at CERN. In 1984 he became full professor at the University of Heidelberg. In 1991 he was offered a professorship at the University of Hamburg and at the same time was appointed Director of Research at DESY. He is chair of the board of the TESLA Collaboration, which works on superconducting accelerator development.

 


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Editor: Alan Chodos
Associate Editor: Jennifer Ouellette
Staff Writer: Ernie Tretkoff

October 2005 (Volume 14, Number 9)

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Articles in this Issue
APS Members Elect Kadanoff, Bienenstock to Presidential Line
APS Mourns Loss of President-Elect John Bahcall
Twenty Troupes Pack 'Em In To See Physics on the Road
DOE Report Highlights Promising Areas of Solar Energy Research
Cohen Sends Message to Gulf Coast Physicists
APS Selects Mohta as New Congressional Fellow
APS President Says Intelligent Design Should Not Be Taught as Science
U.S. Physics Team Wins Five Medals in 2005 International Physics Olympiad
Estate Planning Information Available to APS Members
Rebecca Forrest Receives First Blewett Scholarship
Correction
Inside the Beltway: The Avoidable Tragedy of New Orleans
Letters
Viewpoint
The Back Page
Members in the Media
This Month in Physics History
Physics and Technology Forefronts
Zero Gravity: The Lighter Side of Science