Honoris Causa

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Science Journal, Fall 1997 -- Vol 15, No. 1 

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Nei Elected to National Academy of Sciences and
Japan Society of Human Genetics

Masatoshi Nei, Evan Pugh Professor of Biology and director of the Institute of Molecular Evolutionary Genetics, has been elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences and an honorary member of the Japan Society of Human Genetics.

Membership in the National Academy of Sciences is considered one of the highest honors that can be accorded a U.S. scientist or engineer. Members of the National Academy assist the nation by addressing matters of importance in science and problems in which the insights of science are of central significance. Nei was selected in recognition of his distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. The Japan Society of Human Genetics announced that Nei was honored "for his important contributions to human and evolutionary genetics."

Nei is the founding director of the Institute of Molecular Evolutionary Genetics, an interdisciplinary organization that fosters research on the evolution of genes and organisms. He is a world leader in evolutionary biology and has helped shape the development of the field of molecular population genetics and evolution. One of Nei's most valuable research contributions has been the development of a series of mathematical and statistical tools for the analysis and interpretation of genetic variation revealed by various molecular techniques. Nei has developed numerous statistical methods for studying the genetic divergence of DNA sequences and for using them to reconstruct phylogenic trees. These methods have now become essential tools for the study of molecular evolution and also are widely used in conservation biology. Nei's statistical method of genetic-distance theory has been applied to the study of human population diversity, human evolution, and the evolution of immune-system genes.

Nei was honored with the Kihara Prize of the Genetics Society of Japan and was elected Fellow of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1990. He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1993 and was named Evan Pugh Professor of Biology in 1994.

George E. Andrews, Evan Pugh Professor of Mathematics and head of the Department of Mathematics, has been elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Andrews, whose work has found major applications in enterprises as diverse as statistical mechanics and computer science, is renowned for his work in number theory and related topics. He is perhaps best known outside the mathematics community for his discovery of the lost notebook of the late mathematical genius, Srinivasa Ramanujan, and his work with the formulas it contains. In addition, he is well known among mathematics educators at institutions ranging from large universities to community colleges nationwide for his involvement in critiquing the current calculus-reform movement.

He was named a Fulbright Scholar in 1960, the Hendrick Lecturer of the Mathematical Association of America in 1980, a Guggenheim Fellow in 1982, a Conference Board of Mathematical Sciences (CBMS) Regional Conference Principal Lecturer in 1985, and the Pi Mu Epsilon J. S. Frame Lecturer in 1993. He received the Penn State Golden Key Outstanding Faculty Award in 1986 and the Penn State Teresa Cohen Award for undergraduate mathematics advising and teaching in 1992. In recognition of his outstanding accomplishments as a teacher and advisor of undergraduate and graduate students, and for his work in mathematics education with elementary and high-school students, he was honored in 1993 by the Allegheny Mountain Section of the Mathematical Association of America as the first recipient of its Distinguished Teaching Award.
 

Jerry L. Workman, associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, has been appointed as an associate investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the largest private supporter of biomedical research and education in the United States. He is one of 70 scientists nationwide selected this year and the first Penn State faculty member ever to receive the award.

Workman says he will use the award to further his laboratory's studies into the mechanisms of gene regulation. "These funds will help to advance our studies into the identification and characterization of protein complexes that disrupt and/or modify the structures of chromosomes and turn on gene expression." His research concerns a central process in gene regulation?how energy-driven teams of molecules function as chromosome-remodeling machines that unlock the cell's genetic codes. A chromosome, the gene-containing structure in a cell's nucleus, is a rope-like molecule of DNA tangled up with proteins. Genes are sections of the DNA that contain a cell's genetic codes.

"Our studies analyze chromosome-modifying protein complexes from human cells and from yeast cells where a powerful genetic system can be exploited to complement biochemistry," Workman explains. "These studies should render new insights into the development of cancers and other human diseases that result from aberrant gene expression."

As a Howard Hughes Medical Institute associate investigator employed by the Howard Hughes Institute, Workman will continue to hold a faculty appointment at Penn State and will conduct his research in a Howard Hughes Medical Institute laboratory located on the University Park Campus. "This award is intended to benefit Penn State in addition to honoring Jerry Workman," says Robert Schlegel, professor and head of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. "He will continue to teach and fulfill other academic responsibilities like any other faculty member, but he will have more time and resources to devote to his research program, which means his productivity will increase as a result of this additional support."

Andrew G. Ewing, professor of chemistry, is the 1997 winner of Penn State's Graduate Faculty Teaching Award, which recognizes tenured faculty who have excelled both in teaching and in supervising thesis work of graduate students.

A specialist in analytical chemistry and neurochemistry, Ewing helped develop Penn State's current course structure for analytical chemistry graduate students shortly after joining the faculty in 1984. From 1990 to 1995 he was his department's assistant head for graduate education and instituted new procedures that doubled the annual number of applications from domestic students. Currently, he is codirector of the neuroscience options in the new Integrative Bioscience Graduate Degree Program.

Ewing says his techniques include a program of monthly "marathon" meetings in his home, weekly topic meetings on campus, and "brainstorming" mini-meetings when and where the situation warrants. He says the meetings, combined with his personal interaction and attention to each student, make for a highly productive research group that depends on collective brainstorming and interaction while encouraging independence.

Paul S. Weiss, associate professor of chemistry, has been selected as a Guggenheim Fellow by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

According to the foundation, Guggenheim Fellows are selected on the basis of their unusually distinguished achievements and their exceptional promise for future accomplishments. Weiss was among 164 scientists, scholars, and artists selected in 1997 out of 2,876 candidates. Weiss is known as an international leader in the fields of analytical and physical chemistry, surface chemistry and physics, and materials science. He set up a scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) laboratory at Penn State, which has been described as "unique and unparalleled," that he has used to produce "both scientifically interesting and technologically important conclusions to research questions that, in some cases, have remained unanswered for decades," according to Steven Weinreb, professor and head of the Department of Chemistry.

"The first microscope Weiss built for his laboratory is likely the finest STM in the world," Weinreb says. Weiss is using this instrument to understand surface chemistry and bonding of single molecules, surface motion, and interactions on surfaces. Another microscope in his lab that Weiss invented himself, a tunable alternating current STM (ACSTM), is one of the few instruments in the world capable of recording chemically-specific atomic-resolution images and spectra on surfaces. Weiss is applying this new tool to a broad range of issues in chemistry, biology, physics, metrology, and materials science.

The award will help to support Weiss' research on single biological molecules and biomolecular complexes. As a visiting scientist at the University of Washington this year, he and his collaborators in the Department of Molecular Biotechnology there have been developing a new set of tools for handling, manipulating, and probing these molecules and complexes.

Among his awards are the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award from 1991 through 1996, the B.F. Goodrich Collegiate Inventors Awards in 1994, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship from 1995 to 1997.
 

Ying Liu, Xiaoxing Xi, and Shyamoli Chaudhuri, all assistant professors of physics, have received Faculty Early Career Development Awards from the National Science Foundation. The award provides four years of funding to stimulate the early development of academic careers in science and engineering and to support the critical roles played by faculty members in integrating research and education.

Liu is an experimentalist in condensed-matter physics whose research is centered on superconductivity and mesoscopic physics. Liu has been doing research in areas related to two-dimensional quantum phase transitions in ultrathin films, quantum tunneling of vortices, novel perovskite superconductors, and disordered mesoscopic superconductors. The central theme of Liu's research is to study the behavior of superconductors under extreme experimental conditions that include severely restricted sample geometries, high or nonhomogeneous magnetic fields, and very low temperatures. In addition to fundamental issues, Liu also is working on high-transition-temperature superconducting devices in collaboration with scientists from Penn State and other institutions. The award will support his research on a project titled "Mesoscopic Physics of Disordered Superconductors: An Arena for Research and Education."

Xi's research concerns the physics underlying the electronic and photonic applications of metal-oxide thin films, which are used in a variety of devices including superconductor, ferroelectric, nonlinear -optical, electro-optical, and magnetic materials. Xi says, "My research focuses on the understanding of fundamental electrical and optical properties of these materials and the effects on them of structural and interfacial defects." Xi uses the pulsed laser deposition technique, which he says is particularly powerful for fabricating the thin films of oxides and multicomponent materials that he tailors for applications involving specific devices. "So my research will have a technological impact, it often involves multidisciplinary collaborations with other departments, industries, and national laboratories," he says. Xi plans to use this award to support his work on a project titled "Low Loss, Tunable Ferroelectric Thin Films by Pulsed Laser Deposition."

(Editor's note: Just as we were going to press, we got the good news that Shyamoli Chaudhuri also was honored with this award. You can read about her research and see her photo in the "New Faculty" section of this issue.)

Karl T. Mueller, assistant professor of chemistry, has been honored by the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation with the Camille Dreyfus Teacher- Scholar Award. Considered one of the most prestigious prizes in its field, the award is designed to provide external support to assist young faculty during the early stages of their careers in continuing their high level of accomplishment in education and research.

Mueller says the award will provide support for the "development of novel methods of solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance for the investigation of the structure and chemistry of complex materials." Mueller plans to use the award to "push forward a number of new experiments, which can be helped by some new equipment, to fund undergraduate and graduate research assistantships, and to allow students to attend meetings where they can discuss their research results with other scientists."

His previous awards include the 1993 Camille and Henry Dreyfus New Faculty Award, the 1994 National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award, the 1996 Research Corporation Cottrell Scholar Award, and the 1996 Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation Young Investigator Award.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has selected Dmitri Burago, assistant professor of mathematics, and Michael J. Natan, associate professor of chemistry, as Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellows. The foundation awards one hundred fellowships annually to faculty in the United States and Canada who are in the early stages of their careers and who have exceptional promise to contribute to the advancement of knowledge in physics, chemistry, computer science, mathematics, neuroscience, or economics.

Burago's research involves differential and Riemannian geometry. His studies of periodic curved n-dimensional spaces, like those obtained by mass distributions in general relativity, are proving applicable to many other problems. One of these problems is a long-standing Hopf's conjecture, which asserts that periodically perturbed Euclidean spaces still having exactly one shortest curve between each pair of points must be a flat Euclidean space. Another result, obtained by methods of singular Riemannian geometry, solves an old problem about billiard systems. This result states that if several hard balls move and collide elastically in empty space (as in a gas model), the total number of collisions can be estimated by a bound depending on the number of balls only. Burago received a Faculty Scholar Medal for Outstanding Achievement in 1996.

Natan's research involves the development of chemical methods to make macroscopic materials from nanoparticles with diameters as small as 10^-9 meters. His work focuses on the self-assembly of single or multiple layers of gold (Au) nanoparticles, which have surface properties that affect the material's electrical conductivity, biocompatibility, and the absorption and reflection of light, among other properties. These surface properties are important for devices involving biological and environmental sensors, as well as for materials applications.

Natan received the Beckman Young Investigator Award in 1994.

Sloan Fellows receive unrestricted grants of $35,000 for a two-year period, with which they are free to pursue whatever lines of research are of most interest to them. This flexibility often is of great value to young scientists who are at a pivotal stage in establishing independent research projects.

The General Prize in the 1997 Rhone-Poulenc Prizes for Science Books, which has been described as the most prestigious prize for science writing in the English language worldwide, has been awarded to Alan Walker, distinguished professor of anthropology and biology, and Pat Shipman, adjunct associate professor of anthropology. The Penn State husband-and-wife team win approximately $16,500 for their book titled The Wisdom of the Bones: In Search of Human Origins. The award, which is sponsored by the British Science Museum, the Committee for the Public Understanding of Science and the Rhone-Poulenc company, honors the best science book written for the nonscientist and published in England during 1996.

"The Wisdom of the Bones," published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf and in England by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, has been hailed as a thrilling story about the excitement and challenges that confront human beings unearthing the origins of modern humans.According to the award sponsors, the book also "profoundly influences the debate about how and when the modern human developed." It tells the story of Alan Walker's discovery in Kenya of the most complete skeleton ever found of Homo erectus, a species that proved to be an ancestor of modern humans, which was unexpectedly tall and strong but did not have full language. It will be reprinted by Rhone-Poulenc and a copy will be sent to every university, college, and high school in England.

For the first time this year, because of the strength of the entries, each of the shortlisted books was given a "runners-up" award, including: "Climbing Mount Improbable" by Richard Dawkins, "Fire in the MInd" by George Johnson, "In the Blood: God, Genes and Destiny" by Steve Jones, "The Origins of Virtue" by Matt Ridley, and "Longitude" by Dava Sobel. Among the former winners of the prize are "Plague's Progress" by Arno Karlen in 1996, "Wonderful Life" by Stephen Jay Gould in 1991; and "The Emperor's New Mind" by Roger Penrose in 1990.

Jayanth R. Banavar, professor of physics, has been honored by Penn State with its Faculty Scholar Medal. The award recognizes scholarly or creative excellence represented by a single contribution or a series of contributions around a coherent theme. A committee of faculty peers reviews nominations and selects the award winners.

He has solved a set of fundamental, long-standing problems involving fluid motions at the molecular scale and in the continuum limit using computer simulation techniques. His work has opened the pathway to understanding fluid properties at short length scales, and has highlighted how state-of-the-art computer technology can solve fundamental scientific problems. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society.

Nina V. Fedoroff, professor of biology, director of the Life Sciences Consortium, director of the Penn State Biotechnology Institute, and the Verne M. Willaman Chair in Life Sciences, has been selected by Sigma Xi, the honorary scientific research society, to receive its 1997 John P. McGovern Science and Society Medal. The award honors scientists for their interests that go beyond their specific research areas. According to the society, Fedoroff was selected for her interest in "the emerging, important issue of the reform of graduate education as it relates to alternative careers for scientists and engineers." In addition to her numerous scholarly publications, Fedoroff also has authored many papers, editorials, and commentaries on the issues surrounding the societal debate over the use of recombinant DNA technology. She presented the McGovern keynote address at the annual meeting of Sigma Xi, where she received the medal and a monetary award.

Fedoroff is perhaps best known for her research on the molecular biology of mobile genetic elements, also known as transposons, in plants and on the developmental regulation of gene expression. Among her accomplishments, she isolated and characterized the first complete maize transposable genetic element?research that provided the molecular basis for understanding unusual phenomena first described in maize by Nobel Laureate Barbara McClintock. Fedoroff later identified and studied the molecular mechanism of regulation of the maize Suppressor-mutator element and also identified a unique regulatory protein encoded by this element. "The ultimate goal of my research is to identify and understand the function of genes that are important in plant development," Fedoroff says.

She is a member of the board of directors of the Sigma-Aldrich Corporation, the editorial boards of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, The Plant Journal, and Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, and the International Advisory Board to the Englehardt Institute of Molecular Biology in Moscow.

Fedoroff was honored in 1990 with the Howard Taylor Ricketts Award, cited in 1992 as an Outstanding Contemporary Woman Scientist by the New York Academy of Sciences, and named one of the fifty most outstanding alumni of the Damon Runyan-Walter Winchell Foundation in 1996. She presently is the holder of a National Institutes of Health MERIT Award. Fedoroff is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi honorary societies.

Anatole Katok, professor of mathematics, has been named the new Raymond N. Shibley Professor of Mathematics. The professorship, which is awarded to a different faculty member every five years, was established in 1986 by Raymond N. Shibley, then a partner in the Washington D.C. law firm of Leboeuf, Leiby, and MacRae. Katok is the third holder of the chair, most recently held by Jerry Bona, adjunct professor of mathematics.

Katok's research covers a broad variety of subjects in the theory of dynamical systems, which serves as the mathematical foundation for the field of nonlinear dynamics and the theory of chaos. His research has played a major role in establishing some of the fundamental paradigms central for the applications of dynamics to many scientific problems, which can be loosely expressed as "infinitesimal hyperbolicity implies stochastic (chaotic) behavior" and "exponential complexity of the orbit structure implies infinitely many periodic orbits," among others. His work also concerns interrelations between dynamics and several core mathematical fields, especially differential geometry and the theory of Lie groups.

Katok says he intends to use the bulk of the funds provided by the Shibley professorship to support the newly established Center for Dynamical Systems at Penn State. Katok, who is the center's founding director, says its principal mission is to stimulate research in the theory of dynamical systems and related areas; to serve as a forum for exchange of ideas within the world-wide dynamical-systems community; and to foster interaction, exchange of ideas, and joint projects between mathematicians and researchers in other areas interested in nonlinear dynamics.

Katok was awarded the Moscow Mathematical Society Annual Prize for Young Mathematicians in 1967, which was given for the best work by a mathematician below the age of 30. He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1983 and at a number of other prestigious lectures including, most recently, the Ramakant Muzumdar Commemorative Lectures at the University of Bombay India in 1996.

Raymond N. Shibley earned a bachelor's degree in commercial chemistry at Penn State in 1947. In addition to the Raymond N. Shibley Professorship in Mathematics, he has endowed the Shibley Memorial Fund at Penn State to honor the memory of his parents, wife, and sister, all of whom had Penn State ties.

The largest optical telescope in the continental United States, invented by Lawrence W. Ramsey and Daniel W. Weedman, professors of astronomy and astrophysics, is among thirty-five innovations honored by Discover magazine this year and one of four in the Aviation and Aerospace category of the 1997 Discover Magazine Awards for Technological Innovation. Nearly 4000 innovators from around the world were invited to participate in the awards competition.

Ramsey's and Weedman's invention, the William P. Hobby-Robert E. Eberly Telescope, will be commissioned in late 1997 at the McDonald Observatory in a remote area of western Texas known for having the darkest skies in North America. The telescope was featured in the July 1997 issue of Discover magazine.

Ramsey and Weedman invented the concept for the Hobby-Eberly telescope in 1983 at Penn State. Its innovative design resulted in construction costs that are about 20% of what it costs to build other telescopes in its class. A number of features allow the 24-ton primary mirror to remain stationary while observing an object, eliminating the need for a highly complex mirror-support system. The mirror, which is 36 feet across and one of the largest of any optical telescope in the world, is made up of 91 identical pieces that were mass produced--another cost-saving aspect of the design.

The telescope was built by a partnership involving The University of Texas at Austin, Penn State, Stanford University and the German universities of Goettingen and Munich. Ramsey and Thomas Sebring, project manager for the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, are named as recipients of the Discover award. According to the Walt Disney Company, which publishes Discover, the awards "recognize breakthrough technologies and honor the men and women whose creative genius improves the quality of everyday life."

Calyampudi R. Rao, Holder of the Eberly Family Chair in Statistics and director of the Center for Multivariate Analysis, has been awarded a honorary doctorate of mathematics degree by the University of Waterloo in Canada and a honorary doctorate of science degree by the University of Guelph in Canada. He now is the holder of twenty distinguished honorary doctorate degrees from universities in fifteen countries.

Rao is internationally acknowledged as one of the world's top five statisticians for his multifaceted distinctions as a scientist, teacher, mathematician, and researcher. His pioneering contributions to mathematics and statistical theory and applications have become part of graduate and postgraduate courses in statistics, econometrics, electrical engineering, and other disciplines in most universities throughout the world.

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and also a Fellow of the Royal Society in England.

David L. Allara, professor of materials science and chemistry, has been honored with the rank of Fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He was among 283 scientists to receive the distinction this year. The association selects as Fellows members whose "efforts on behalf of the advancement of science or its applications are scientifically or socially distinguished."

Allara is a materials chemist whose research includes surface chemistry and analytical spectroscopy with applications to properties of thin films and the chemical reactions at interfaces and surfaces. He is being honored for his innovative studies of the properties and preparation of novel solid interfaces that can be used in electrochemical, electronic, and optical devices.

Gutti J. Babu, professor of statistics, has been named a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, a singular honor within the association that recognizes an individual's outstanding professional contribution and leadership in statistical science. Babu was recognized for his outstanding contribution to statistical science, his work on asymptotic theory, and for his promotion of interdisciplinary activities.

Babu has broad research interests in both statistics and probability, including their applications to problems in biomedical research, astronomy, and astrophysics. His work during the early 1980s resulted in establishing the superiority of the bootstrap approximation for a wide class of statistical tests and laid the foundation for subsequent work on second-order approximations of this method. Since the late 1980s, he has led efforts to bring advanced statistical methods to serve the research needs of observational astronomy. He and Eric D. Feigelson, professor of astronomy and astrophysics, recently coauthored an interdisciplinary book titled Astrostatistics and coedited the proceedings of the conference titled Statistical Challenges in Modern Astronomy II. Babu also has been a leader in organizing several cross-disciplinary conferences on statistics and astronomy.

George E. Andrews, Evan Pugh Professor of Mathematics and head of the Department of Mathematics, has been selected to receive a "Laurea Honoris Causa" honorary doctoral degree in physical sciences from the University of Parma in Italy.

According to the university, the Faculty of Science unanimously awarded the honor to Andrews because of his "important contribution to the advancement of theoretical physics, in particular to statistical mechanics," and because of his "brilliant example of fruitful collaboration between mathematics and physics."

Andrews, whose work has found major applications in enterprises as diverse as statistical mechanics and computer science, is renowned for his work in number theory and related topics. He is perhaps best known outside the mathematics community for his discovery of the lost notebook of the late mathematical genius, Srinivasa Ramanujan, and for his work with the formulas it contains. In addition, he is well known among mathematics educators at institutions ranging from large universities to community colleges nationwide for his involvement in critiquing the current calculus-reform movement.

C. Eugene Wayne, professor of mathematics at Penn State, is the recipient of the 1997 Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching. The award was presented by the Allegheny Mountain Section of the Mathematical Association of America in recognition of his extraordinary teaching accomplishments.

Wayne, who says he "takes great pleasure in, and places great importance on, good teaching," uses computer technology for teaching mathematics. He redesigned the upper-level mathematics course, Advanced Calculus for Engineers and Scientists, in collaboration with Simon Tavener, associate professor of mathematics at Penn State, to make extensive use of the computer algebra package, Maple. Wayne recently taught a graduate course on the use of computer algebra systems for dynamical-systems research, for which he produced a number of programs with integrated graphics and text using the computer algebra package, Mathematica.

In addition to his work at Penn State, Wayne also serves as a member of the steering committee of the Pennsylvania Early Mathematics Advising Program (EMAP), a volunteer program that provides free testing in mathematics for high-school students throughout the state to help them prepare for their college mathematics courses. In 1992, Wayne won the C.I. Noll Teaching Award, the highest honor for undergraduate teaching given by the Penn State Eberly College of Science.

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