APS News

November 2002 (Volume 11, Number 10)

Physicists Honored at November Unit Meetings


Nine physicists will be honored with APS prizes and awards at APS unit meetings being held this month. The 2002 Maxwell Prize, Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics, and the Rosenbluth Doctoral Thesis will be presented at the meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics, to be held November 11-15 in Orlando, Florida. The 2002 Fluid Dynamics Prize, Otto Laporte Award, and 2002 Acriros Award will be presented at the meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics, to be held November 24-26 in Dallas, Texas.

2002 James Clerk Maxwell Prize

Edward Frieman
Science Application International Corporation
University of California, San Diego

Citation: "For contributions to the theory of magnetically confined plasmas, including fundamental work on the formulation of the MHD Energy Principle and on the foundations of linear and nonlinear gyrokinetic theory essential to the analysis of micro-instabilities and transport."

Frieman is a plasma physicist with research interests that extend into other physical science fields. He was a professor at Princeton University for more than 25 years, after which he was employed by the federal government and in the private sector. Frieman earned his doctoral degree in physics in 1952 from Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, New York. Currently senior vice president, science/technology at SAIC, Frieman is also director emeritus of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

2002 Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research

Troy Carter
University of California, Los Angeles

Scott Hsu
California Institute of Technology

Hantao Ji
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory

Masaaki Yamada
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory

Citation: "For the experimental investigation of driven magnetic reconnection in a laboratory plasma. In this work, careful diagnostic studies of the current sheet structure, dynamics and associated wave activity provide a comprehensive picture of the reconnection process."

Carter received B.S. degrees in physics and in nuclear engineering from North Carolina State University in 1995. He received his PhD in astrophysical sciences in 2001 from Princeton University. For his dissertation, he performed an experimental study of turbulence in the current sheet of the Magnetic Reconnection Experiment. This work provided the first experimental evidence of the operation of the lower-hybrid drift instability in a laboratory current sheet. Carter was awarded a DOE Magnetic Fusion Energy Postdoctoral Fellowship, which he took to UCLA to pursue experimental studies of turbulence and transport in magnetized plasmas. He is now continuing this work as an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UCLA.

Hsu received his B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1993. He received his PhD in plasma physics from Princeton University in January, 2000, having investigated ion heating and acceleration during magnetic reconnection on the Magnetic Reconnection Experiment (MRX). Subsequently, he went to Caltech to work on laboratory plasma experiments designed to study magnetic helicity injection during spheromak formation. In December, 2002, Hsu will join the P-24 Plasma Physics Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory and continue pursuing research in basic experimental plasma science related to fusion energy and plasma astrophysics.

Born in China, Ji received a B.S. degree in physics from Ehime University (Japan) in 1985, and a PhD in physics from University of Tokyo (Japan) in 1990. After working on the Large Helical Device (LHD) project at National Institute for Fusion Science (Japan), he worked on the Madison Symmetric Torus (MST) at University of Wisconsin, Madison, and since 1995 he has been conducting research on the Magnetic Reconnection Experiment (MRX) at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. Currently, his research interests include physics of magnetic reconnection, magnetor- otational instability and MHD surface waves in liquid gallium, dynamo effects and conservation of magnetic helicity in self-organizing plasmas, turbulence and associated transport processes.

Yamada is a Distinguished Laboratory Research Fellow at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, and heads the MRX research program. He graduated from University of Illinois with PhD in physics in 1973. In that same year he joined PPPL as a postdoctoral fellow. He became the head of the Q-1 research group in 1977 and carried out many basic plasma physics experiments. During 1978-1988, he headed the research effort on the spheromak, then a new concept for fusion, utilizing the S-1 device. Yamada pioneered the MRX program at Princeton to explore the fundamental physics of magnetic reconnection, one of the most difficult and fundamental problems in plasma physics that has been under intense theoretical discussion for many decades. Currently the MRX group is focusing it's work on fast reconnection in collision free plasmas.

2002 Marshall N. Rosenbluth Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award

Mayya Tokman
University of California, Berkeley

Citation: "For the development of exponential propagation methods for 3-D MHD simulations and for their application to the solar corona, giving new understanding of observed features of coronal mass ejections."

Tokman began her undergraduate education at Baku State University in Azerbaijan, a former republic of the Soviet Union. After immigrating to the US, she completed her B.S. in applied mathematics with specialization in computing at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1995 she became a graduate student in the applied mathematics department at the California Institute of Technology. Currently she holds the position of visiting assistant professor in the mathematics department at UCB. Her research interests include mathematical modeling, numerical methods and computational science. She is particularly interested in developing effective models of physical phenomena which exhibit multiscale behavior.

2002 Fluid Dynamics Prize

Gary Leal
University of California, Santa Barbara

Citation: "For his extensive use of a blend of modern analysis, innovative numerical computation, and experiments to elucidate phenomena in classical and polymer fluid dynamics."

Leal attended graduate school at Stanford University, where he carried out his PhD research under the guidance of Andreas Acrivos, after competing his degree in 1969 and two years of postdoctoral work, he joined the chemical engineering faculty at Caltech (1970), where he remained until moving to UCSB in 1989. At UCSB, he served as department chair in chemical engineering for nine years. In addition to his normal professional duties, he is currently one of the two editors of Physics of Fluids.

2002 Otto LaPorte Award

Andrea Prosperetti
Johns Hopkins University

Citation: "For breakthroughs in the theory of multiphase flows, the dynamics of bubble oscillations, underwater sound, and free-surface flows and for providing elegant explanations of paradoxial phenomena in these fields."

Prosperetti received his PhD in engineering science at Caltech in 1974. He was a member of the physics faculty from 1974 to 1985 at the University of Milan. Since 1998 Prosperetti has been Berkhoff Professor of Applied Physics (part-time) at University of Twente (The Netherlands) and since 1994 the Charles A. Miller Jr. Professor at John Hopkins. His research interests include fluid-solid disperse multiphase flow, gas-liquid multiphase flow, bubble dynamics and cavitation, free surface flows, computational fluid mechanics and acoustics

2002 Andreas Acrivos Award

Wade Schoppa
Shell

Citation: "For his studies on the generation of coherent structure in near-wall turbulence."

Biographical information not available at press time.

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Editor: Alan Chodos
Associate Editor: Jennifer Ouellette

November 2002 (Volume 11, Number 10)

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Articles in this Issue
APS Members Choose Cohen as New Vice President in 2002 Election
Letters
Inside the Beltway: A Washington Analysis
APS Counter-Terrorism Task Force Meets on September 11
Viewpoint
This Month in Physics History
Topical Conference Explores How Physics Can Help Biology
The Back Page
Zero Gravity: The Lighter Side of Science
Teaching Introductory Physics with Tales from the Subatomic Zoo
PRL Top Ten
Electronic Voting a Hit with APS Members
Editorial Cartoon
The Physics of Football Goes Global
Physics and Technology Forefronts
Physicists Honored at November Unit Meetings