P E O P L E

Briefs

Northwestern University has awarded its Frederic Esser Nemmers Prize in Mathematics to Princeton professor Yakov Sinai. The award, which is given every two years and carries a stipend of $125,000, recognizes Sinai for his major contributions to the study of chaos.

Sinai's work deals with measuring complex systems that change over time, such as the weather and economic systems. He was the first to develop a mathematical description of the complexity of changing, chaotic systems, creating an approach now called Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy. This work gives mathematicians a critical tool for solving the complex equations that describe such systems.

Sinai, who joined the mathematics faculty in 1993, has received many other awards and honors, including the 1997 Wolf Prize in mathematics and the 1992 Dirac Medal of the International Center for Theoretical Physics.

Stanley Katz, director of the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies and faculty chair of the Under-graduate Program at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, recently was elected to a three-year term on the board of directors of the Social Science Research Council.

The council is an independent, nongovernmental, not-for-profit international organization that seeks to advance social science throughout the world and supports research, education and scholarly exchange on every continent. Since 1923, it has helped to generate new knowledge on key social issues, ranging from human sexuality to the challenges of globalization and from the impacts of information technology to current transformations in international higher education.

Melissa Miller, a graduate student in molecular biology, has been awarded a 2002 Harold Weintraub Graduate Student Award from the Basic Sciences Division of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

Miller, who works in the lab of Associate Professor Bonnie Bassler, was one of 17 graduate students from North America and Europe chosen for the award. The recipients, selected for the quality, originality and significance of their work, will participate in a scientific symposium in May in Seattle.

Princeton honored Miller earlier this year with its Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship, the University's highest award for graduate students. Miller also has received an award for the best talk by a graduate student at Princeton as well as the Department of Molecular Biology's outstanding teaching award.

Edmund Synakowski and Randy Wilson, both physicists at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, recently received honors from the American Physical Society. The society gave Synakowski the 2001 Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research and named Wilson a Fellow.

Synakowski was cited for his contributions to experiments that demonstrated a novel means of suppressing turbulence and the loss of heat from plasmas -- the hot, ionized gases used as fuels for the production of fusion energy.

Wilson was named an American Physical Society Fellow in recognition of his major pioneering contributions to understanding the use of radio-frequency waves to heat and drive an electric current in fusion plasmas.
 

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March 25, 2002
Vol. 91, No. 20
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Contents

In the news
• Graduate students share their expertise in local classrooms
• Tilghman visit to Chicago school fires excitement about science