Bienenstock Elected American Physical Society President

Arthur Bienenstock, a Stanford University professor and former associate director of the White House Office and Science Technology (OSTP), is the new APS president, following a recent election of officers by the society’s membership.

Bienenstock is special assistant to the president for federal research policy at Stanford University, where he is also a professor at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory, and in the Applied Physics and Materials Science & Engineering departments.

From 2003 to 2006, Bienenstock served as vice provost and dean of research and graduate policy and as acting provost for graduate education through December 2006.

Before taking on these positions, he served as director of the Geballe Laboratory for Advanced Materials.

From November 1997 through January 2001, while on leave from Stanford, Bienenstock was the associate director for science of OSTP.

At OSTP, Bienenstock sought to gain general recognition of the interdependences of the sciences and the need for the country to maintain broad scientific and technological strength.

He succeeds APS President Leo Kadanoff of the University of Chicago.

In other APS election news, Cherry Murray, deputy director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, assumed the post of president-elect and Curtis Callan, professor and former chair of the physics department at Princeton University, won the race for vice president.

Next year, Murray will become APS president while Callan will serve as APS president-elect.

Murray joined Lawrence Livermore in 2004, where she is the senior executive responsible for overseeing the quality of science and technology in the laboratory’s programs and disciplines. Before taking her position at the laboratory, she worked at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, where she served as senior vice president for physical sciences and wireless research.

Callan, a theoretical particle physicist, received his PhD from Princeton in 1964. In 1967, after completing postdoctoral work at Princeton, he worked as an assistant professor in physics at Harvard University, before returning to the faculty at Princeton.