Skip navigation

Archive for the ‘Awards’ Category

Nobel week in pictures

October 17th, 2012

It begins with a phone call in the wee hours of the morning, and while the media calls eventually come in at a slower pace, the glory of a Nobel Prize lasts for generations.

This year the Scandanavians rang twice for Stanford. First, on Oct. 10, BRIAN KOBILKA, professor and chair of molecular and cellular physiology at the Stanford School of Medicine shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with ROBERT LEFKOWITZ, professor of biochemistry and of medicine at Duke University. The two men were selected for their work on G-protein-coupled receptors.

Then on Monday, Oct. 15, ALVIN ROTH, a Harvard economist who is transitioning to Stanford, was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on market design. He shares the prize with LLOYD SHAPLEY, professor emeritus at UCLA. Roth is a pioneer in the field of game theory and experimental economics and in their application to the design of new economic institutions.

University Photographer LINDA CICERO created slideshows of Kobilka and of Roth.
Videogrpher STEVE FYFFE, put together videos of Kobilka and Roth as well.

Multicultural Alumni Hall of Fame inducts four distiguished new members

October 8th, 2012

From left, Michelle Alexander, Juju Chang, Annie Gutierrez and Loren Kieve. Photo by David Gonzales

On Friday morning, a reporter spotted an alumna looking at a map as she walked across campus and stopped to ask the woman if she needed directions. The visitor was looking for El Centro Chicano, and since the reporter was headed in that direction, they walked together. The alum marveled at how much the campus had changed, particularly its diversity. She said that when she arrived on campus in the late ’60s, she was one of only a handful of Chicano students. As they parted, the alumna introduced herself simply as “Annie.”

Fast-forward to Friday evening, the two ran into each other again, this time in Tresidder Union. “Annie,” it turned out, was ANNIE L. GUTIERREZ, JD ’71, a retired judge of the Superior Court of the State of California and a nationally and internationally recognized attorney. She was among four distinguished alumni being inducted into the Multicultural Alumni Hall of Fame.

Each year since 1995, inductees representing the campus’ four ethnic community centers are honored during Reunion Homecoming Weekend.

In addition to Gutierrez, who represented El Centro, the other inductees for this year were JUJU CHANG, ’87; MICHELLE ALEXANDER, JD ’92; and LOREN KIEVE, ’69.

Chang, an Emmy Award-winning correspondent for ABC News, was inducted by the Asian American Activities Center. She also served as moderator for this year’s Roundtable at Stanford.

Alexander, the Black Community Services Center’s inductee, is a law professor at Ohio State University. A civil rights advocate and litigator, Alexander is the author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

Kieve, a distinguished trial lawyer and legal scholar who has led several state and American Bar associations, has advanced the fields of civil justice reform, civil rights, and evidence rules and policies. Inducted by the Native American Cultural Center, Kieve is a champion of native arts and culture and interdisciplinary undergraduate education.

—ELAINE RAY

 

Blas Cabrera chases dark matter, wins Panofsky physics prize

October 5th, 2012

Blas Cabrera

Abandoned mines might not be the most obvious places to set up cosmological experiments, but that’s where Stanford physicist BLAS CABRERA and BERNARD SADOULET, of the University of California-Berkeley, search for signs of dark matter. Their efforts have advanced dark matter research, and in recognition they have been jointly awarded the 2013 W.K.H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics. The prize is named for SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory founding director WOLFGANG “PIEF” PANOFSKY and awarded by the American Physical Society.

The pair’s decades-long Cryogenic Dark Matter Search has brought them to several underground sites in the hunt for direct evidence of theorized weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs (the deep shafts largely shield detectors from cosmic rays and other unwanted particle “noise”). If proven to exist, WIMPs could help define and explain dark matter, which is thought to make up about 25 percent of the energy density in the universe and is responsible for the formation of structure in the universe. This, in turn, could improve our understanding of the evolution of the universe and our interpretation of astronomical observations.

Cabrera, a Stanford physics professor who has a term appointment within the SLAC Particle Physics and Astrophysics faculty, said the prize, which includes a $10,000 award and a certificate citing the recipients’ scientific contributions, is gratifying, and it’s “wonderful to share it” with Sadoulet, a Berkeley physics professor and director of the UC Institute for Nuclear/Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology. “We have been leaders of the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search work for many years,” he said. “It’s also nice to have the tie with Panofsky, whom I knew and deeply admired for many years.”

Read the full announcement at the SLAC News Center.

— BY GLENN ROBERTS, JR., SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

 

Scholars awarded grants to explore ecosystem

October 4th, 2012

FIORENZA MICHELI, a professor of biological sciences, and REBECCA BIRD, an ecological anthropologist, were recently awarded National Science Foundation grants of $1.3 million and $250,000, respectively.

Micheli, an affiliate with the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, will study the capacity of natural systems and human communities to adapt to environmental change. Specifically, her project will investigate the impacts of oceanographic variability on coastal marine ecosystems and human communities of the Pacific coast of Baja California, Mexico.

Bird’s project will measure direct effects of indigenous burning practices on woodlands and low-elevation, mixed forests in the Central Valley, Klamath Mountains and Sierra Nevada and indirect effects of these practices on the availability of wild foods and materials used by indigenous peoples that inhabit the woodlands.

Both research projects got their start with funding from the Woods Institute’s Environmental Venture Projects, seed grants for transformative environmental and sustainability research.

 

— ROB JORDAN, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment

Hellman and two of his graduate students inducted into National Cyber Security Hall of Fame

October 1st, 2012
Martin Hellman

Martin Hellman and two of his graduate students have been elected to the National Cyber Security Hall of Fame.

The Stanford professor and two graduate students who invented public-key encryption are three of 11 inaugural inductees in the National Cyber Security Hall of Fame. In 1977, MARTIN HELLMAN, now a professor emeritus of electrical engineering, and two of his graduate students, WHITFIELD DIFFIE and RALPH MERKLE, introduced the encryption tool that today safeguards many trillions of dollars worth of online financial transactions every day.

“It’s a great honor,” Hellman said. “I’m really pleased that this great work – which almost everyone discouraged me against pursuing – has worked out this way.”

Colleagues discouraged the team’s pursuit because it was going up against the National Security Agency, which many suspected might classify the work. Indeed, this was a worry right up until the group presented its work: Although, the encryption software was written to make online banking communications more secure, there was concern that it could also be used by criminals and foreign adversaries to protect their messages from law enforcement and national intelligence.

Public-key cryptography protects information sent from one user to another – individuals or institutions – using a pair of numeric keys that undo one another. The sender first enciphers his message using the intended recipient’s public key (accessible by everyone), and the recipient uses his secret key (known only to him) to decipher and access the information. (For more details on the encryption process and the history of the work, click here.)

The three were selected from more than 200 nominations and will be enshrined along with eight other inductees at a black-tie gala at the Four Seasons Hotel Baltimore on Oct. 17. The Hall of Fame will eventually be located on the first floor of the World Trade Center in Baltimore, Md., where inductees will be featured in interactive video displays.

Hellman now focuses on the risks associated with nuclear arms proliferation and, on Oct. 18, will be presenting his findings to the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, D.C.

Read more about the National Cyber Security Hall of Fame.

Electrical engineering graduate student wins Marconi Young Scholar Award

September 28th, 2012

The Marconi Society, which is devoted to encouraging scientific contributions in the field of communications and the Internet, has recognized graduate student AAKANKSHA CHOWDHERY with one of three 2012 Paul Baran Marconi Young Scholar Awards. The awards are given to young researchers (no older than 27 at the time of the award—the same age as Marconi when he completed the first radio transmission) who are on track to become leading innovators contributing to the advancement of science and humanity.

Aakanksha Chowdery

Aakanksha Chowdhery

Chowdhery is the first woman to receive the award since it was created in 2008.

According to the Marconi Society’s press release, “Chowdhery’s research in the field of Dynamic Spectrum Management (DSM) for next-generation copper-access networks focuses on improving data rates and stability in digital subscriber lines (DSLs) suffering from intermittent noise effects. Her DSM research promises successful co-existence and deployment of next-generation copper networks that can deliver data-rates up to Gbps with legacy networks.”

Chowdhery is “a superstar on the rise,” according to JOHN CIOFFI, the Hitachi America Professor in the School of Engineering, Emeritus. Cioffi, who is quoted in the society’s online story, is Chowdhery’s advisor and the 2006 Marconi Prize Winner for his invention of the DSL modem.

“Aakanksha solved several difficult mathematical problems instrumental to the practical deployment of the upcoming multi-100Mbps DSL services, preserving the large theoretical gains in numerous practical unbundled deployment scenarios,” he said. “She has found ways to take traditional theories and find the appropriate combinations of well-defined problems that characterize an actual situation via various optimization principles.”

Chowdhery completed her MS in electrical engineering at Stanford and is on track to receive her PhD in December.

This marks the fifth year that Young Scholar Awards have been granted by the Marconi Society. The society looks for those who not only have shown extraordinary early promise but have made an impact through published research.

The Young Scholar Awards include a financial stipend and an invitation and travel funds to attend the annual Marconi Award Dinner.

Read more about the award and about Chowdhery’s research.

Lucy Shapiro wins the 2012 Horwitz Prize

September 27th, 2012
Lucy Shapiro

Lucy Shapiro has won the 2012 Horwitz Prize.

LUCY SHAPIRO is one of three recipients of the 2012 Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize, awarded by Columbia University. Shapiro, a professor of developmental biology at the School of Medicine, and her colleagues Richard Losick of Harvard and Joe Lutkenhaus of the University of Kansas Medical School, were recognized for their work on the three-dimensional organization of bacteria cells. Established in 1967, the Horwitz Prize is Columbia University’s top honor for achievement in biological and biochemistry research.

“It is a great honor to receive the Louisa Gross Horwitz Award,” said Shapiro, who is the Virginia and D. K. Ludwig Chair in Cancer Research in the Department of Developmental biology and the director of the Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine. “The work recognized by this award is the culmination of the shared intellectual input and vision of a large group of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows with whom I’ve had the pleasure of sharing the passion and joy of scientific discovery.

“Particularly important has been the establishment and flowering of an interdisciplinary lab at Stanford in collaboration with Harley McAdams, a physicist who is a professor in the Department of Developmental Biology where we run an integrated lab with physicists and engineers working side by side with molecular geneticists and cell biologists,” she said.

McAdams and Shapiro’s relationship goes beyond the lab; they also are married!

Read more about Shapiro’s work and about the Horwitz Prize.

Stephen Quake receives 2013 Nakasone Award

September 26th, 2012
Stephen Quake

Stephen Quake

STEPHEN QUAKE, professor of bioengineering and of applied physics and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, has received the 2013 Nakasone Award from the Human Frontier Science Program Organization for “prolific inventions that have advanced biological measurement techniques.”

Quake has introduced large-scale quantitative approaches in many areas of biology that were previously impossible to address. His innovations include a rapid DNA sequencer, a non-invasive prenatal test for Down syndrome and the biological equivalent of the integrated circuit.

He is the holder of more than 80 patents, has founded at least four companies based on his conceptions and has invented technologies that have transformed science and medicine in fields ranging from genomic sequencing and microfluidics to infectious disease and medical diagnostics.

Read more about Quake’s inventions and the Nakasone Award.

Two Stanford-led research teams receive Collaborative Innovation Awards

September 21st, 2012

Axel Brunger

Two teams of scientists led by Stanford professors have received Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Collaborative Innovation Awards to carry out potentially transformative research over the next four years.

One of the teams is led by AXEL BRUNGER, a professor of molecular and cellular physiology and of neurology and neurological sciences. His team received a $6 million award to develop new methods of sample delivery, data collection and analysis to study structures of nanometer- or micron-scaled crystals of biological molecules using the Linac Coherent Light Source at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

Brunger’s collaborators include WILLIAM WEIS, a professor of structural biology and of molecular and cellular physiology and of photon science at Stanford, as well as scientists at UC-Berkeley, UCLA and the California Institute of Technology.

Liqun Luo

Also receiving a $6 million award is a group led by LIQUN LUO, a professor of biology. Luo’s team plans to develop a suite of tools for mapping neuronal connections in the complete mouse brain. They will then use those tools to study the organization of neural circuits and how they are affected by specific neurotransmitters, to ultimately better understand how sensory perception works.

Luo collaborates on this project with KARL DEISSEROTH, a professor of bioengineering and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford, as well as an HHMI Early Career Scientist winner. Collaborators also include scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences and Hebrew University.

 

-30-

Gretchen Daily wins Swedish environmental prize

September 14th, 2012

Gretchen Daily

Biology Professor GRETCHEN DAILY recently won the prestigious Volvo Environment Prize for 2012. The prize includes a cash award of 1.5 million Swedish kronor (about $209,000).

The prize, awarded by the Volvo Environment Prize Foundation, an independent foundation in Sweden, recognized Daily’s “pioneering research on quantifying the production and value of ecosystem services; on harmonizing biodiversity conservation and agriculture; and on policies for integrating conservation and human development in major societal decisions.”

Daily, the Bing Professor in Environmental Science, is a founding director of the Natural Capital Project and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. An ecologist by training, Daily’s work spans scientific research, teaching, public education and working with leaders to advance practical approaches to environmental challenges.

She will receive the prize in Stockholm on Nov. 20.

Previous Stanford winners of the award include fellow biology faculty HAROLD MOONEY (2010) and PAUL EHRLICH (1993).