NERSC Users Honored for Scientific Accomplishments

Two NERSC users with joint appointments at the University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory were elected to the National Academy of Sciences: Steven G. Louie, Professor of Physics and an expert on nanotubes and fullerenes, is one of the 25 most highly cited authors in nanoscience and one of the 100 most cited researchers in all of physics. Barbara A. Romanowicz, Director of the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory, studies deep earth structure and dynamics; she discovered that the mysterious waves that constantly reverberate through the Earth, even on days without earthquakes, originate from storm-driven sea waves.

Michael Norman, Professor of Physics at the University of California, San Diego, was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Norman is PI of the 2006 INCITE project “Precision Cosmology Using the Lyman Alpha Forest,” which aims to measure the cosmological parameters that describe the shape, matter-energy contents, and expansion history of the Universe.

The American Physical Society presented the David Adler Lectureship Award to James Chelikowsky, Professor of Physics, Chemical Engineering, and Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Texas, “for his creative and outstanding research in computational materials physics and for his effectiveness in communicating research results through lectures and publications.”

Three NERSC users were recipients of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers: Wei Cai, an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University, was honored for work he did at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in developing a computer model that simulates the dynamics of crystals as they deform. Hong Qin, a physicist at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, was recognized for his contributions to the physics of high-intensity particle beams and for his work on electromagnetic effects in magnetically confined plasmas. Zhangbu Xu, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, was honored for his novel research techniques which led to the detection of subatomic particles termed “short-lived resonances” and “open charm” at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.

Yu-Heng Tseng, a computational climate researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, was honored as an Outstanding Overseas Young Scientist by the Foundation for the Advancement of Outstanding Scholarship in Taiwan.