Nine Physicists Honored at November Division Meetings

Five APS prizes and awards will be awarded this month, honoring nine physicists for their work in plasma physics and fluid dynamics. The 2006 James Clerk Maxwell Prize, Excellence in Plasma Physics Award and Rosenbluth Award will be presented during the annual meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics, to be held October 30 to November 3 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The 2006 Fluid Dynamics Prize and Andreas Acrivos Award will be presented during the annual meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics, to be held November 19-21 in Tampa Bay, Florida.

James Clerk Maxwell Prize

Chandrashekhar J. Joshi, University of California, Los Angeles

Citation: “For his insight and leadership in applying plasma concepts to high energy electron and positron acceleration, and for his creative exploration of related aspects of plasma physics.”

Joshi is a Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering at UCLA. He is also the director of the Center for High Frequency Electronics and heads the Neptune Laboratory for Advanced Accelerator Research at UCLA. He received his PhD in 1978 from Hull University in the UK. Following a two year stint as a research associate at the National Research Council of Canada, where he worked on laser-plasma interactions, he joined UCLA. Joshi has built a strong research group that has done pioneering work in the areas of laser-plasma instabilities, plasma-based light sources, laser-fusion, and basic plasma experiments. His group is best known, however, for developing the field of plasma-based particle accelerators over the past two decades. He is also a past recipient of DPP’s Excellence in Plasma Physics Award.

Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research

Ryosuke Kodama, Osaka University
Peter Norreys, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
Max Tabak, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Kazuo Tanaka, Osaka University

Citation: “For developing the Fast Ignition inertial fusion concept and for demonstrating key aspects of it in a series of experiments that have catalyzed the world-wide effort on the concept.”

Kodama is a professor of engineering at Osaka University. He studied electrical engineering and science at Osaka University, earning his PhD degree in 1990. He was a visiting researcher at Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford University and Central Laser Facility, Rutherford Appleton in UK from 1990 to 1992, when he joined Osaka University’s Institute of Laser Engineering. He is now exploring high energy density science in methods of introducing a plasma photonics concept to control intense light and high energy density charged particles.

Norreys started his study of laser-plasma interaction physics at Royal Hollow College, University of London. After obtaining his PhD in 1988, he was awarded a JSPS post-doctoral fellowship at the Institute of Laser Engineering at Osaka University, Japan. He took up a position at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory upon his return to the UK in 1990. He has held a number of UK research council grants that have investigated high intensity laser-plasma interaction physics relevant to fast ignition of fusion targets. He has led the Physics Group at the Central Laser Facility since 2001, and is currently a visiting professor of physics at the Blackett Laboratory, Imperial College London.

Tabak received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1975 in experimental high energy physics. He followed this work with post-doctoral training in elementary particles at the Weizmann Institute of Science and at Carnegie Mellon University. Since 1980, Tabak has been associated with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and is now a group leader in the Defense and Nuclear Technology Department as well as Associate Program Leader for Inertial Fusion Target Design in the Fusion Energy Program. His current research involves designing optimized implosion systems and reducing ignition laser requirements for Fast Ignition.

Tanaka finished his PhD at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics, University of Rochester in 1982. He stayed at the University of Rochester for three years and then he joined the faculty at Osaka University. His major interests include fast ignition, laser plasma interactions, and equations of state. He reported the first deuterium fuel implosion using foam spherical shells and fast ignition integral experiments as invited talks at the APS.

Rosenbluth Award

Cameron Geddes, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Citation: “For experimental and computational studies of channel-guided laser wakefield accelerators.”

Geddes is a physicist in the LOASIS program at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he works on laser-driven particle acceleration and intense laser-matter interaction. He received his PhD in physics in 2005 from the University of California, Berkeley. His thesis work demonstrated the first laser-driven accelerator in which the laser pulse propagation was controlled by a pre-formed plasma channel, resulting in production of mono-energetic beams for the first time in a laser wakefield accelerator.

Fluid Dynamics Prize

Thomas Lundgren, University of Minnesota

Citation: “For his insightful theoretical contributions to numerous areas of fluid mechanics, most notably in the fields of turbulence and vortex dynamics.”

Biographical information unavailable at press time.

Andreas Acrivos Award

Eric Lauga, MIT

Citation: “For his dissertation, ‘Slip, Swim, Mix, Pack: Fluid Mechanics at the Micron Scale,’ a treatment of slip and mixing relevant to micron-scale geometries, swimming of micro-organisms, and self-assembly of colloidal particles.”

Lauga received an undergraduate degree from the Ecole Polytechnique in France in 1998, and then joined the Corps de Mines program at the Ecole des Mines in Paris, during which he spent a year at the University of California, San Diego. After receiving the French equivalent of a master’s degree from the University of Paris IV, he went on to earn his PhD in 2005 from Harvard University. His thesis work concerned theoretical investigations of flow behavior at the micron scale. He is currently an assistant professor of applied mathematics at MIT, focusing on problems in biofluid mechanics and microfluidics.