B R I E F S 

Princeton NJ -- Christodoulos Floudas, professor of chemical engineering, has received the Professional Progress Award for Outstanding Progress in Chemical Engineering. The prize is given annually by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers in recognition of outstanding progress in research by a member of the profession under 45 years of age.

Floudas was honored for his seminal contributions to research on the theory, methods and applications of deterministic global optimization in chemical process system engineering, computational chemistry and molecular biology. The author of two textbooks and the co-author of more than 100 scientific papers, he has applied the techniques of deterministic global optimization to the protein folding problem, which is widely regarded as one of the major scientific challenges in computational chemistry and structural biology.

Alan Krueger is co-winner of the Mahalanobis Memorial Medal from the Indian Econometric Society, along with Abhijit Banerjee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This prestigious award, given every five years, is presented for "outstanding contributions to quantitative economics."

Krueger is the Bendheim Professor of Economics and Public Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. His primary research and teaching interests are in the general areas of labor economics, industrial relations and social insurance. The editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, he served as chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor in 1994-95.

Two  honored by the American Mathematical Society

Two Princeton faculty members have been honored by the American Mathematical Society.

Elias Stein, the Albert Baldwin Dod Professor of Mathematics, has received the 2002 Leroy Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement. It recognizes Stein's "fundamental contributions to various aspects of analysis, including the theory of singular integrals, commutative and noncommutative harmonic analysis and analysis of functions of several complex variables."

According to the society, Stein has contributed both through his own research and through working with and influencing many students, "who have gone on to make profound contributions of their own."

Elliott Lieb, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics, has been awarded the society's 2002 Levi Conant Prize along with Jakob Yngvason of the University of Vienna. The prize is awarded for "an outstanding expository paper in the Notices of the AMS or the Bulletin of the AMS in the last five years." The two were honored for their co-written paper, "A Guide to Entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics," which appeared in the Notices of the AMS in 1998.

Michael Cook, the Cleveland Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies, is the winner of the 2001 Albert Hourani Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association for his book "Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought." The award recognizes outstanding publishing in Middle East studies.