 |
      |
 |
 |
||
 |
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||
 |
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||
|
Go To: |
|
Biological Sciences | Chemistry | Economics | Engineering | Mathematics | Physical Sciences |
 |
 |
BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
David Baltimore
Professor of Biology and President
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
|
|
|
What: Baltimore's far-reaching discoveries dramatically altered the directions of study in fields from molecular biology to virology and immunology. His leadership in science extends to building excellence in scientific institutions, his motivational teaching, his leadership in academic and public policy and his unparalleled statesmanship in fostering communication between scientists and the general public.
Why: At M.I.T., Baltimore made a key discovery of a protein carried in cancer-inducing viruses that reverses the ordinary flow of information in biological systems. This protein copies RNA into DNA, turning the transient molecule RNA into the permanent cell constituent DNA, thus allowing cancer-inducing viruses to become part of an infected cell's genetic endowment. This was counter to the widely accepted dogma of the time. The discovery further ignited hope for the development of new antiviral and anticancer drugs and led to further discoveries of many cancer-causing genes that are known today. Baltimore's discovery was made simultaneously with Howard Temin of the University of Wisconsin, for which they shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Founder of the innovative MIT-affiliated Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and a central figure in the establishment of the Center for Cancer Research, Baltimore helped build both into world class organizations. He was also president of Rockefeller University.
Baltimore was one of the small groups of leaders in the scientific community who developed and implemented the National Institutes of Health (NIH) guidelines for recombinant DNA research. He also served as the national chairman on committees that established important federal policies in AIDS research and the Human Genome Initiative. He has been a leading spokesperson on guidelines for recombinant DNA research, the birth of the Genome Project, and the Federal role in HIV vaccine research.
His educational impact has been enormous on the lives of the many students he has trained and guided. Thirteen of his former students and fellows have been appointed investigators of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Education: Doctorate from Rockefeller University, New York, N.Y. Bachelor's degree in chemistry from Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.
Jared Diamond
Professor of Physiology
University of California at Los Angeles School of Medicine
What: Diamond's seminal research includes areas of physiology, ecology, conservation biology, and history. He led a revival in tropical ecology and is recognized as one of the founders of conservation biology. He is widely regarded for communicating science by explaining technical advances in understandable terms.
Why: Diamond is a leader in simultaneously applying Darwinian evolutionary approaches to the disparate fields of physiology, ecology, conservation biology, and human history. He pioneered analysis of biological structures from an engineering point of view, and interpreted them in terms of evolutionary trade-offs resulting from natural selection. This research program has transformed evolutionary analysis of the structure and function of animals' bodies from a qualitative to a quantitative science.
Diamond, as an ecological scientist, led a revival in the discipline of tropical ecology, through field studies of birds in New Guinea during 18 grueling expeditions into New Guinea's most remote, previously unexplored mountain ranges. He is especially known for discovering the quantitative "assembly rules" of tropical community organization; for providing field evidence of the role of competition in nature; and for determining how hundreds of bird species can co-exist in a small area of rainforest.
Dr. Diamond is widely recognized as one of the founders of conservation biology, leading the way in interpreting differences among species as to their susceptibility for extinction. This was a contribution of immense value to those interested in preserving endangered species.
A tireless communicator of science to the general public, Diamond authored over 500 articles and seven books, and is a regular contributing editor to Discover Magazine. Diamond's recent book Guns, Germs, and Steel, unravels the complex reasons why human societies evolved so differently on individual continents over the last 13,000 years. Drawing on modern advances in diverse fields ranging from epidemiology and crop genetics to linguistics and animal behavior, the book compellingly demonstrates that history's broad patterns are primarily due to differences in area, isolation, major axis orientation, and availability of wild animal and plant species suitable for domestication.
Education: Doctorate in physiology, University of Cambridge, England, Master of Arts degree, Bachelor of Arts degree in biomedical sciences, Harvard College, Cambridge, Mass.
Lynn Margulis
Distinguished University Professor
Department of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
|
|
|
What: Margulis has made outstanding contributions to understanding the structure and evolution of living cells and inspired new research in the biological, climatological, geological and planetary sciences. She is also recognized as an extraordinary teacher and communicator of science to the public.
Why: Margulis made contributions of profound importance to our understanding of the development and structure of living cells that influenced fields as disparate as organismal biology, molecular biology, exobiology, cellular biology, medical science, climatology, geology, and paleontology.
Margulis was the first scientist to convince the Western world that the cells of all plants and animals are composite beings. She unraveled the complex story of the symbiotic origin of eukaryotic cells, causing a leap in understanding of how evolution of the cells of higher organisms took place - explained not by the slow accumulation of mutation-generated changes but rather by the sudden fusion of two or more life forms to produce a more complex, completely new species. The discovery changed much in the biological sciences, from our understanding of what keeps cells healthy, to our understanding of the history of complex life.
With colleagues from around the world, Margulis unearthed communities of organisms and unsuspected interactions, which have heightened our knowledge of the microbial world. Her insight that life, in aggregate, is an important geological force on the planet has inspired new research in the biological, climatological, geological and planetary sciences.
Margulis also inspired a generation of students in the U.S. and abroad to question conventional wisdom, and to push the limits of knowledge about the world around us.
Education: Doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley. Master of Science degree from the University of Wisconsin, and A.B. degree, from the University of Chicago.
CHEMISTRY
Stuart A. Rice
Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor
The James Franck Institute, The University of Chicago.
|
|
|
What: Rice has changed the very nature of modern physical chemistry through his research, teaching, and writing, using imaginative approaches to both experiment and theory that have inspired a new generation of scientists.
Why: Rice's contributions, both experimental and theoretical, guided the evolution of modern physical chemistry from statics to dynamics. He has generated new understanding of topics ranging from the structure and dynamics of simple liquids and their surfaces to the coherent control of chemical reactions.
Rice has pioneered theories for liquid state dynamics, the excited states of molecular crystals and ordered polymers, the transfer of molecules, charge and energy in disordered materials and the control of molecular dynamics with shaped laser pulses. Rice was among the first to recast the phenomenon of radiationless transitions into a predictive description of a process occurring throughout photochemisty and photobiology. He was among the first to demonstrate the ubiquity of selected energy transfer in molecular collisions. He was the first to propose a method using times laser pulses to control the choice of product in a chemical reaction, and his numerous other studies of the control of molecular dynamics have been at the forefront of, and have shaped, this rapidly developing field. Rice's highly innovative approaches to the structure and spectroscopy of amorphous solid and liquid water have resulted in great improvements in our understanding of the properties of water.
Rice has combined research with abilities as a mentor to inspire a whole new generation of scientists to pursue careers in academia, government and industry. He has co-authored a textbook in physical chemistry, and research monographs on the theory of polyelectrolyte solutions, the theory of liquids, and optical control of molecular dynamics. He also co-edited the leading review series "Advances in Chemical Physics," for 35 years.
Education: Doctoral and A.M. degrees, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., and Bachelor of Science degree, Brooklyn College, N.Y.
John Ross
Professor of Chemistry
Stanford University, Calif
|
|
|
What: Ross has had an enormous impact on physical chemistry, especially in studies of molecular dynamics, nonlinear kinetics and complex reaction mechanisms.
Why: Ross pioneered in the study of chemical reactions in molecular beams with the first measurements of rainbow scattering, elastic scattering in reactive systems, and the dependence of reaction probability on internal molecular motions.
For the last thirty years Ross has been a leader in theory and experiments in nonlinear kinetics, oscillatory reactions, chemical spatial structures, the efficiency of chemical and biological engines, and the thermodynamic and stochastic analysis of systems far from equilibrium.
Ross has demonstrated the computational possibilities of chemical kinetics, and the presence of such properties in biochemical reaction networks. This work has led him to develop revolutionary new approaches to the determination of reaction pathways in complex systems. His studies have been fundamentally important to chemistry, chemical engineering, biochemistry and biology.
Ross was a major figure in building the chemistry department at Brown University, and was called as chair to rebuild the chemistry department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he also served as chair of the faculty, and served as chair of the chemistry department at Stanford. He is a leading educator and co-author of "Physical Chemistry", a widely used reference book.
Education: Doctorate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, and Bachelor of Science degree, Queens College, N.Y.
Susan Solomon
Senior Scientist
Aeronomy Laboratory, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Boulder,
Colorado
What: Solomon provided key scientific insights explaining the cause of the Antarctic ozone "hole," and advanced the understanding of the global ozone layer. Her research findings changed the direction of ozone research, and provided exemplary service to worldwide public policy and to the American public.
Why: Solomon is best known for her contributions to understanding the Antarctic ozone "hole." Stratospheric ozone depletion was predicted as early as 1974, but it was not observed until 1985 when the ozone hole in Antarctica was discovered. In 1986, Solomon and colleagues suggested that chemical reactions occurring on the surfaces of polar stratospheric clouds could greatly enhance reactive chlorine compounds in the Antarctic stratosphere. This mechanism is now firmly established as the key first step in producing the ozone hole.
In 1986 and 1987, Solomon also led a scientific expedition to the Antarctic where she made measurements not only of ozone, but also of other critical chemicals, particularly chlorine and nitrogen dioxide. She and her colleagues provided the first direct observations pointing toward such chemistry as the cause of the ozone hole.
Solomon also demonstrated the important role of volcanoes and chlorine in affecting ozone outside the Polar regions. Surface reactions similar to those occurring on polar stratospheric clouds can take place on sulfate aerosols resulting from explosive volcanic eruptions, affecting ozone over mid-latitude locations such as the United States and Europe. Solomon also showed how to compare the impacts of proposed substitutes for ozone-depleting gases to one another, putting the research for replacements on a solid scientific footing and clarifying the basis for international protocols on substances that deplete the ozone layer. Her work served not only science, but also the public and the international policy process.
Education: Doctorate and Masters degrees in chemistry, University of California, Berkeley, and Bachelor of Science in chemistry, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago.
ECONOMICS
Robert M. Solow
Institute Professor Emeritus
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.
What: Solow created the modern framework for analyzing the effects of investment and technological progress on economic growth, which has greatly influenced economics and economic policy worldwide.
Why: Solow showed how to separately measure the growth of the economy among increases in the labor supply, capital stock, and improved technological possibilities. The analysis showed the critical importance of technological advances for economic growth, an importance considerably larger than had been stressed before. The framework was sufficiently flexible to easily accommodate further factors affecting growth, including human capital and increasing returns to scale.
The analysis of economic growth, based on the Solow model, continues to be one of the major research areas of economics and is employed worldwide in the study of policies to improve economic growth. Solow's work also revolutionized research in much of economics, including statistical processes of inequality, the effects of taxation, the level of the national debt, the design of institutions in developing countries, the use of both renewable and nonrenewable resources, the determination of exchange rates, and the long-run effects of monetary policy. Subjects previously studied separately and without adequate dynamics are now studied in an integrated fashion with attention to dynamic and long-run consequences. For this major contribution, Solow was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1987.
Solow also made important contributions to macroeconomics, particularly in the study of unemployment. His analysis of the relationship between inflation and unemployment highlighted many ways in which the relationship might not be stable over time.
Solow is an outstanding teacher, lecturer and thesis supervisor who has influenced an unusually large number of economists. He was part of the John F. Kennedy Council of Economic Advisors, and has an enormous long-standing impact on the economics profession.
Education: Doctorate, Masters and Bachelor of Arts degrees in economics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
ENGINEERING
Kenneth N. Stevens
C. J. LeBel Professor of Electrical Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.
What: Stevens has pioneered contributions to the theory, mathematical methods, and analysis of acoustics in speech production, leading to the contemporary foundations of speech science.
Why: Stevens' research laid the groundwork for many of the speech synthesis and recognition technologies of today. His theoretical work on acoustic properties of speech sounds that comprise the linguistic elements of language has led to the contemporary foundations of speech science. His theoretical work on acoustic invariance has defined unifying principles that have integrated major portions of acoustic phonetics, phonology, speech science, and linguistics.
How people move the tongue, lips, and other articulators fast enough to accomplish speech is one of the classical puzzles of speech science. Stevens has shown that many of the distinctions between speech sounds utilize special non-linear relations between articulation and acoustic output that enable speakers to produce correct sounds without having to hit all of the individual articulator targets with particular accuracy. In this way, he has unraveled an important part of the mystery that shrouds our ability to produce and understand speech.
Many of the leading speech scientists throughout the world have been Stevens' students or post-doctoral fellows, or have sought out sabbaticals in his laboratory. Stevens' laboratory has been referred to by colleagues as a "national treasure."
Education: Sc.D. in electrical engineering, M.I.T., Cambridge, M.A.Sc. and B.A.Sc. in engineering physics, University of Toronto.
MATHEMATICS
Felix E Browder
University Professor
Rutgers University, Piscataway, N.J.
What: Browder pioneered mathematical work in the creation of nonlinear functional analysis that opened up new avenues in nonlinear problems that were previously out of reach, and he served as a leader in the scientific community to broaden the range of interactions among disciplines.
Why: Browder's creation of nonlinear analy-sis and its applications to nonlinear partial differential equations have had long-term impact on mathematics. One of his major early achievements was to advance the study of elliptic partial differential equations to treat nonlinear problems that had previously been out of reach. The thrust of his theory was a liberation from the requirements of compactness and convexity, thus opening up a wide range of problems of nonlinear partial differential equations to exacting analysis.
Browder's seminal work in the evolution of (acoustic, radio, water, etc.) waves has had profound influence on mathematics and other scientists around the world.
Browder's progressive inter-national view of science made him a leader for his time. It was through his efforts that the French school of analysis developed the strong interactions with their American counterparts, which characterizes present-day research efforts. His supportive efforts to improve undergraduate and graduate education in the mathematical sciences included bringing about the successful AMOCO project at the University of Chicago, a program to engage inner-city youth in science, as well as the Center for Mathematics, Science and Computer Education and the Outreach Program in Mathematics at Rutgers University. He has sustained advocacy over many years of the involvement of women and minorities in science and mathematics.
At a time when it was not popular within mathematical circles, Browder advocated including applied mathematics at the highest levels into mathematics departments, which he pursued successfully at Rutgers and at the University of Chicago, where he is the Max Mason Distinguished Service Award Professor Emeritus.
Education: Doctorate in mathematics, Princeton University, Bachelor of Science in mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston.
Ronald R. Coifman
Phillips Professor of Mathematics
Yale University, New Haven, Conn.
What: Coifman made fundamental contributions to the field of harmonic analysis and made major contributions to adapting that field to the capabilities of the digital computer to produce a family of fast, robust computational tools that have substantially benefited science and technology.
Why: Coifman is a world leader in harmonic analysis. He introduced tools powerful enough to solve key problems in pure mathematics, yet sufficiently simple and flexible to become the basis for new, fast algorithms to handle the problems of wave propagation, data storage, denoising, and medical imaging. As Coifman moved to applied mathematics, his work in the development of wavelet analysis had a revolutionary impact.
In collaboration with Ives Meyer, Coifman constructed a huge library of waveforms of various duration, oscillation, and other behavior...and through a clever algorithm developed with Victor Wickerhauser, it became possible to do very rapidly computerized searches through an enormous range of signal representations in order to quickly find the most economical transcription of measured data. This development allowed, for example, the FBI to compress a fingerprint database of 200 terabytes into less than 20 terabytes, saving millions of dollars in transmission time and storage costs.
Coifman also used wavelet analysis to develop tools for processing noisy data. He recognized that one can essentially remove noise completely, allowing for short time exposure magnetic resonance images that would enable real-time "movies" inside the human body.
Coifman has continued to work on many computational problems in numerical analysis. The Beylkin-Coifman-Rokhlin matrix multiplication algorithm makes it possible to solve certain problems in high intensity computations that were beyond the capability of any computer one might envision using previous algorithms.
Coifman's intellectual leadership has attracted first-class scientific talent from around the world to come to the United States to work on problems of national importance in signal processing and scientific computing.
Education: Doctorate, University of Geneva, Switzerland.
PHYSICAL SCIENCES
James W Cronin
University Professor Emeritus, Department of Physics and Astronomy
and Astrophysics
The Enrico Fermi Institute, The University of Chicago
What: Cronin made fundamental contributions to the fields of elementary particle physics and astrophysics. He is a leader in creating an international effort to determine the unknown origins of very high-energy cosmic rays, focused on asking some of the most fundamental questions concerning the nature of the universe and its basic components.
Why: Cronin, together with Val Fitch at Princeton University, shared the 1980 Nobel Prize for discovering one of the essential ingredients in explaining the predominance of matter over antimatter in the universe.
Cronin was a pioneer in the development of the spark chamber as a tool that allowed visualization of selected interactions of matter.
At the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Dr. Cronin led a series of experiments that provided critical information to the conjecture that protons have a substructure known as quarks. This conjecture has now been incorporated into our basic understanding of particle physics.
With colleagues in Utah, Cronin conducted an experiment, which demonstrated that earlier speculations and experiments on the existence of certain sources of high-energy cosmic rays were in error.
Cronin revitalized the University of Chicago's program in elementary particle physics by attracting leading young scientists to the Chicago faculty and helping them initiate new streams of research.
Most recently, Dr. Cronin has been the leader of a major international consortium to build a detector array with the goal of measuring the origin and intensities of the highest energy cosmic rays striking earth's atmosphere. He is now engaged in the initial stages of construction of this project, the "Pierre Auger Project" in the Southern Hemisphere that will be the first that is able to see the southern sky.
Education: Doctorate and Master of Science degrees in physics, University of Chicago, Bachelor of Science, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Tex.
Leo P. Kadanoff
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Distinguished Service Professor
The James Franck Institute, The University of Chicago
What: Kadanoff has been a leader in fundamental theoretical research in statistical, solid state and nonlinear physics, and in particular, for the development of scaling and universality for those fields. Universality says that often, different things look precisely alike. Scaling describes how to change systems of units to make them look exactly alike.
Why: Kadanoff has been a force in theoretical physics for nearly forty years. His concepts of scaling and universality have been used widely, both in research and in teaching. His textbook with Gordon Baym, Quantum Statistical Mechanics, is considered a classic and has been translated into many languages.
In his most important study, Kadanoff showed that sudden changes in material properties (for example, the magnetization of a magnet or the boiling of a fluid) could be understood in terms of scaling and universality. With his collaborators he showed how all the experimental data then available for the changes, called second order phase transitions, could be understood in terms of these two ideas. These same ideas have now been extended to apply to a broad range of scientific and engineering problems, and have found numerous and important applications in urban planning, computer science, hydrodynamics, biology, applied mathematics and geophysics.
Kadanoff has played a major role in the education of students. At the University of Chicago, he was awarded the Quantrell Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching. He has been instrumental in introducing computers into physics laboratories, as well as developing associated instructional material. He has influenced the University of Chicago's entire academic approach by his strongly interdisciplinary techniques that blend experiment, theory and computation. He creates opportunities for significant participation by students, postdoctoral associates and young colleagues in a very broad range of research topics.
Education: Doctorate, Masters and A.B. degrees, Harvard University.
- Medal of Science Fact Sheet
- 1999 Science Medalists: Press Release
- 1999 Science Medalists: Summaries of Achievements
|
|
|
|
 |