The Robert S. Hyer Research Award, of the Texas Section of the American Physical Society, will be presented each year to two pairs of recipients. The first pair will consist of a recipient who must have been a graduate student when the research was performed, and this student's research advisor. The second pair will consist of a recipient who must have been an undergraduate student when the research was performed, and that student's research advisor. The only criterion is excellence, including potential impact in the relevant scientific community. The research must be in physics or a physics-related subject, and it must have been presented at a Texas APS meeting within the past two years by either the student or the advisor, both of whom must have been TSAPS members at the time. Nominations for the award, including a maximum of three letters of support (in addition to the nomination letter), can be submitted either before or after presentation of the research at a Fall or Spring TSAPS meeting. Normally all recipients must be in attendance when the award is presented to them. Also, the award will normally not be given in two consecutive years to recipients at the same institution. Nominations will remain active for two years, or until no longer eligible. The Executive Committee will name a 3-person awards committee to choose the recipients each year. The conditions for the presentation of the award will be decided by the Executive Committee.

Each recipient will receive a plaque, and the student recipients additionally will receive $500 each. Awards will be presented at the Fall meeting.

Note: The requirement that the research "must have been presented at a Texas APS meeting" is satisfied if the work is presented at the SAME Texas APS meeting where the Hyer Award is conferred. I.e., research presented at earlier meetings and research presented at the current meeting are equally eligible for a Hyer Award at the current meeting. The new talks (and poster presentations) on Hyer-nominated work will be given Friday morning, before the award presentation.

Nominations should be received by the last Friday of September. They should either be emailed as electronic files (pdf, rtf, Microsoft Word) or mailed as paper copies to the Chair of the Hyer Award Committee, Prof. Allan MacDonald of the University of Texas at Austin; other committee members are Prof. Mark Holtz of Texas Tech University and Prof. Timothy Head of Abilene Christian University. Electronic submissions are preferred, but paper submissions will be given equal weight. Each nomination should be received in a single submission (e.g., in a series of email messages from the nominator which arrive together), and should preferably include (1) the nomination letter, (2) any other supporting letters, (3) vitae for both nominees, and (4) any papers or other supporting materials. For the 2009 award, the nominations must be received by September 25, 2009, and should be sent to:

Prof. Allan MacDonald
macd@physics.utexas.edu

or

Prof. Allan MacDonald
Department of Physics
University of Texas at Austin
1 University Station C1600
Austin, TX 78712-0264

 

Photographs and portrait from Robert Steward Hyer: The Man I Knew (Anson Jones Press, Salado, Texas 1957), by Ray Hyer Brown. Original credit for the photo of Robert Hyer demonstrating the use of x-rays to faculty members at Southwestern University: Special Collections, A. Frank Smith, Jr. Library Center, Southwestern University, Georgetown, Texas.