Honoris Causa
Science Journal -- Spring 1997 -- Vol 14, No. 1
Moses H. W Chan, Evan Pugh Professor of Physics, has been honored with the prestigious Fritz London Prize in Low-Temperature Physics in recognition of his outstanding and wide-ranging contributions in low-temperature physics research. He was selected to receive the award specifically for "his innovative and precise experimental studies of phase transitions in fluids, especially in reduced dimensions, restricted geometries, and in the presence of disorder and impurities, as well as for his contributions to the experimental study of wetting."
The prize is awarded every three years at the International Conference on Low-Temperature Physics, which took place this summer in Prague, the Czech Republic. Chan is one of three physicists worldwide to receive the award this year.
Chan's research is aimed at answering, or raising, fundamental questions about matter in its various phases. The principles he and his research group have helped to establish may be useful in a wide variety of problems involving interfaces or disordered media. "Dr. Chan has given us a series of exceptional discoveries that each reflect his style of very thoughtful experimental design, very careful execution, a focus on the most significant problems, and no fear of the unknown," says Milton W. Cole, professor of physics and a colleague of Chan at Penn State.
A major achievement of Chan's research group in 1984 was the confirmation of a theory that arguably is the most important to date in modern statistical mechanics?and yet, until the work of Chan and his group, it had not been tested experimentally since it was first proposed 40 years earlier. His laboratory found that the liquid-vapor transition of monolayer molecules adsorbed on a surface is, in fact, the experimental realization of the two-dimensional Ising model first solved by Lars Onsager in 1944.
In 1991, Milton Cole and his collaborators made the unexpected prediction that alkali metals provide the weakest adsorption surface for simple gases such as helium, hydrogen, and neon. Novel phenomena can occur because of the weak adsorption, such as the "wetting transition," during which an adsorbed film can spontaneously jump from less than a monolayer to tens of layers thick. Chan's research group is among the first to confirm this prediction, and further experiments in Chan's laboratory continue to find intriguing results in such systems.
One of the ongoing interests of Chan's group cited by the London Award is the attempt to understand the effect of disorder and impurities on phase transitions in fluids, particularly liquid helium. One surprising effect at very low temperatures is that liquid helium transforms into a superfluid with the ability to flow without friction through atomically narrow channels.
Most recently, Chan and his group have introduced fluids into aerogels?highly porous glasses in which atomically thin silica strands interconnect at random sites, forming the skeleton of a very open structure. In spite of its low density of silica strands?as little as 0.5 percent of the total volume?they found that the highly porous aerogel medium has profound effects on the nature of the superfluid transition and on the liquid-vapor ordering transition of helium. Chan's group discovered that in a mixture of helium-3 and helium-4, the aerogel produces a new superfluid phase rich in helium-3 in addition to the expected helium-4-rich superfluid. These surprising results have attracted considerable interest and ongoing research efforts within the theoretical physics community.
Alan C. Walker, distinguished professor of anthropology and biology, has been named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in recognition of his distinguished contributions to science.
One of the world's foremost experts on the evolution of primates and humans, Walker has made many important discoveries at paleontological sites in Africa. He pioneered studies of living primates as a basis for the analysis of fossils. He was one of the first to use scanning electron microscope studies of enamel microwear on teeth to predict dietary adaptations of extinct mammals.
His most recent discovery, in Kenya in 1995 in conjunction with Meave Leakey, was skeletal remains of a previously unknown species in the human lineage, which they named Australopithecus anamensis, that lived about 4 million years ago. Walker's analysis of these remains has shown, among other things, that this species walked upright.
Bruce G. Lindsay, distinguished professor of statistics, and Kenneth M. Merz, associate professor of chemistry, have been selected as Guggenheim Fellows 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. Lindsay and Merz were among 158 scientists, scholars, and artists selected to receive the award in 1996 out of nearly 3,000 candidates.
Bruce G. Lindsay has earned a wide reputation for his seminal work in mixture models. His work on conditional likelihood inference in the presence of nuisance parameters is recognized as a major contribution to the foundations of statistical theory and it also has practical applications to genetics and ecology. He serves as associate editor of two journals in theoretical statistics and provides expertise to Penn State faculty in many disciplines. His doctoral students now are making their own contributions to the field.
The Guggenheim Fellowship will help to support Lindsay's efforts to develop a nonparametric approach to parametric statistics. He will conduct this research, which could expand the understanding of robust statistical methods, during a sabbatical year at the University of Victoria.
Kenneth M. Merz is known for his computer simulations of the structure, function, and dynamics of biologically important molecules. These simulations provide researchers with insights into chemical phenomena at the molecular level that, in many cases, are not possible to obtain experimentally. His research involves the development of coupled quantum-mechanical and classical simulation models?two powerful techniques for studying the structure and reactivity of enzymes. He also studies the structure, function, and inhibition of zinc metalloenzymes, which are involved in such disease conditions as glaucoma and cancer. In addition, he is investigating the interactions of peptides with cell membranes, which either facilitate or inhibit the fusion of cells. This latter effort will provide insights into such infectious diseases as Influenza and HIV, as well as into other cell/cell interactions such as fertilization.
The Guggenheim Fellowship will help to support Merz's research into the recognition of ions by metalloproteins, which is an important process in biological systems with applications in fields ranging from medicine to bioremediation. This research is designed to provide molecular-level details regarding the way in which an ion is recognized by a protein scaffolding, which then can be used by other scientists to design metal binding sites in proteins with the desired capabilities. He will carry out the research during a sabbatical year at the University Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg, France.
Penn State President Graham B. Spanier has announced that James B. Anderson, professor of chemistry, and Paul F. Baum, professor of mathematics, have been named Evan Pugh Professors, the highest honor the University bestows on a faculty member. They are among 23 Evan Pugh Professors who currently are serving Penn State.
James B. Anderson's work in physical chemistry has yielded important new knowledge in such fields as surface science, supersonic molecular beams, cross-beam reactive scattering, the rare-event approach to molecular dynamics, and quantum mechanics. Among other research efforts, he pioneered the application of the quantum Monte Carlo method to the calculation of the energies of atomic interactions, resulting in a series of exact predictions for small molecules and highly accurate predictions for larger systems.
Paul F. Baum has gained international recognition for his work on applying K-theory to a variety of mathematical problems. Among his important early research was the extension of the Riemann-Roch theorem to algebraic varieties that may be singular. His current projects include studies that center on a proposed formula for the K-theory of group C* algebras. This work, which cuts across several different branches of mathematics to unify a number of well-known problems in representation theory and geometry-topology, can be applied to such topics as the layout of trees, buildings, and symmetric spaces.
Alexander Wolszczan, distinguished professor of astronomy and astrophysics, has received the 1996 Casimir Funk Natural Sciences Award from the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America. The institute annually honors a distinguished natural scientist of Polish origin, living in North America, who has made an outstanding scientific contribution. Last year's Casimir Funk Award winner was Roald Hoffman of Cornell University, a 1983 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry.
In 1992, Wolszczan became the first person to discover planets outside our solar system when he used the 1000-foot Arecibo radiotelescope to detect three planets orbiting a rapidly spinning neutron star. He currently is one of the leaders in the effort to discover extrasolar planets.
Mueller Named Cottrell Scholar and Beckman Young Investigator
Karl Todd Mueller, assistant professor of chemistry at Penn State, has been selected as one of eighteen young faculty scientists nationwide to receive the 1996 Cottrell Scholar Award from the Research Corporation foundation. Cottrell Scholars are selected for the excellence of their research proposal, their plans to improve science teaching, and their vision for the improvement of the academic science community.
Mueller was recognized for his contributions to undergraduate and graduate teaching and his commitment to pursuing a career as a teacher-scholar. The award will help to support his research in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, including a research project titled "Efficient NMR Methods for Determining Multiple Internuclear Distances in Complex Solids."
Mueller also received a 1996 Beckman Young Investigator Award from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation, which makes grants to promote research in chemistry and life sciences, particularly to foster the invention of methods, instruments, and materials that will open up new avenues of research in science. The award will provide two years of support for Mueller's research.
Xumu Zhang, assistant professor of chemistry, is one of 34 researchers nationwide to be selected as a recipient of the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award. The Young Investigator Program, which supports research by exceptional scientists who have held a doctoral degree for fewer than five years, provides recipients with grants for three years to support research in fields that are critical to the Navy and Marine Corps.
Zhang also has received a DuPont Young Faculty Award, which includes unrestricted research support over three years. The award is given to promising faculty who are in the early years of their first full-time appointment.
The awards will help to support Zhang's research, which includes studies of the development of novel biomimetic strategies for the synthesis of ferroelectric liquid crystals (FLCs)?revolutionary new materials that could have applications in devices such as ultrafast electro-optical modulators for optical computing and large-area, flat-panel displays. His research combines concepts from biology with synthetic chemistry to mimic the molecular recognition and catalytic actions of enzymes. "Our approach could provide practical ways to produce a majority of the existing FLCs and, more importantly, advances based on this strategy could accelerate the acquisition of novel FLCs, which are not available through conventional chemistry," Zhang says.
Zhang's overall research program involves the development of novel transition-metal-based catalysts for organic transformations of chemical compounds known as enantiomers, which are important in ferroelectric liquid-crystals and other applications. These compounds contain mirror-image?but not superimposible?pairs of molecules that have identical chemical and physical properties except for the way in which they interact with optically active substances and certain kinds of polarized light. "The physical properties of some electronic and optical devices often depend on their molecular asymmetry," Zhang explains. Among the goals of his research are to understand the factors that control the formation of these molecules and to develop catalytic techniques for producing them in quantities sufficient for industrial applications in the electronics, pharmaceutical, fragrance, food-additive, and agrochemical industries.
B. Franklin Pugh, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, has been named a Leukemia Society Scholar by the Leukemia Society of America. The five-year award supports career development for junior faculty who have demonstrated a capacity for sustained and original research relating to leukemia.
Pugh's research is aimed at understanding the regulation and activation of genes in mammals. One important difference between normal and cancerous cells is how they regulate the expression of their genes. "The protein constituents of cancerous cells are out of proportion to what is found in healthy cells," Pugh explains. His research attempts to define the interactions that lead to the assembly and regulation of protein transcription complexes. Knowledge of the molecular events governing gene expression, which could come from this research, could lead to insights into how changes in gene expression turn healthy cells into cancerous cells.
J. Martin Bollinger Jr., assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, is one of 15 scientists nationwide to receive a 1996 Searle Scholar Award. The award is given to biomedical scientists who are newly appointed assistant professors. Bollinger was chosen from 160 candidates at 86 universities for his potential to make significant contributions to biomedical research over an extended period of time.
The award includes a three-year grant, which will help to support Bollinger's research in the mechanisms of assembly of complex metal ion cofactors in enzymes and regulatory proteins. His research involves several systems with relevance to human health. He explains, "Nature routinely employs chemical reactions that are difficult for chemists to carry out. Many of these reactions are catalyzed by enzymes that use the clusters of metal ions and modified amino acids at their catalytic centers. If we hope to learn from nature's chemical experience, an important question we must answer is how these complex metal ion cofactors are built into the enzymes and proteins in which they ultimately function."
Jeffrey S. Lannin, professor of physics, and Peter I. Mészáros, professor and head of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, have been elected as Fellows of the American Physical Society. Lannin's election to the Society was based on his pioneering contributions toward the understanding of the structure and dynamics of liquids, amorphous solids, and fullerenes, as deduced from Raman and neutron scattering methods. Mészáros was cited "for valuable and influential contributions to the theory of radiation processes near magnetized neutron stars, gamma-ray burst sources, black holes, and galaxy formation."
Jeffrey S. Lannin's experiments focus on understanding the interplay between the structure, bonding, and electronic and vibrational properties of atoms in amorphous and nanocrystalline solids. He uses spectroscopic methods that exploit the interaction between matter and radiation (visible and ultraviolet light and X-rays) to study complex novel materials such as carbon nanocrystals and clusters. A seminal contribution is the development of techniques that enable the measurement of Raman scattering from clusters and ultrathin films. In combination with other surface-sensitive spectroscopies, this technique has opened new and exciting research areas in the solid-state physics of complex materials.
Peter I. Mészáros's research interests involve theoretical issues in high-energy astrophysics and cosmology. He performed the first investigations of dissipative energy losses in black-hole spherical accretion. He also discovered the effect on galaxy formation caused by the freezing of nonrelativistic cold dark matter in the radiation background, and he developed radiation-physics methods to produce the most detailed calculations to date of accreting pulsars. Mészáros also has performed investigations of the cosmological X-ray background and has developed realistic physical models of galactic and cosmological gamma-ray burst sources.
James L. Rosenberger, professor and head of the Department of Statistics, was 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. Rosenberger was selected for his leadership of a major statistics department, for excellence and innovation in his consulting activities, and for his dissemination of knowledge in statistics and statistical computing.
Rosenberger is founding director of the Statistical Consulting Center, established in 1982, which gives statistical assistance to researchers in other disciplines and provides realistic research collaboration experiences for statistics graduate students. He has served as statistical consultant at Penn State and to agencies and companies such as Minitab, Inc.; Nittany Engineers and Management Consultants, Inc.; and the Strategic Highway Research Program.
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 science degree by the University of Guelph in Canada.
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-level courses in statistics, econometrics, electrical engineering, and many other disciplines in most universities throughout the world. He is the holder of over 20 distinguished honorary doctorate degrees from universities in 15 countries.
Jean E. Brenchley, professor of microbiology and biotechnology, has received the Alice C. Evans Award of the American Society for Microbiology. The award recognizes Brenchley's longstanding commitment to the professional development of women in microbiology. According to the society, Brenchley was selected for the award "in recognition of her outstanding example to women in microbiology through her service to the American Society for Microbiology and her excellence in the science of microbiology."
Brenchley has had a distinguished career as a researcher and administrator both in academia and in the biotechnology industry. An acknowledged leader in the field of bacterial metabolism, her current research focuses on enzymes that thrive at unusually low temperatures and the organisms that produce them?an area of considerable fundamental and commercial significance in situations where continued refrigeration is needed to prevent spoilage. Her past research has focused on the discovery and improvement of potentially useful microbial enzymes.
Dimitri Burago, assistant professor of mathematics, and Daniel J. Cosgrove, professor of biology, have received the Penn State Faculty Scholar Medal for Outstanding Achievement. Burago received the University's physical sciences medal and Cosgrove received its life and health sciences medal.
Dimitri Burago's proof of two outstanding conjectures is considered a major achievement in Riemannian geometry. His studies of periodic curved n-dimensional spaces, like those obtained by mass distributions in general relativity, are proving applicable to numerous other problems that only recently seemed unsolvable. His first achievement concerns periodically perturbed Euclidean spaces still having exactly one shortest curve between each pair of points. He proved that such spaces must be flat Euclidean space. His second achievement describes the rate of growth of the volume of a ball in any curved periodic n-dimensional space, in comparison with the corresponding growth in a flat space.
Daniel J. Cosgrove received the award for his pioneering on research on the biophysics, biochemistry, physiology, and molecular biology of expansins?proteins responsible for the mechanism of plant-cell-wall expansion. His research has provided major new insights into the mechanisms of plant cell growth (Science Journal, Fall Semester 1994, page 5). He also recently received a Humboldt Foundation Research Award for Senior U.S. Scientists, which supports scientific cooperation between the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany.
Penn State has honored Douglas N. Arnold, distinguished professor of mathematics, and Richard J. Cyr, associate professor of biology, with its George W. Atherton Award for Excellence in Teaching. The award, named after Penn State's seventh president, honors excellence in teaching at the undergraduate level.
Douglas N. Arnold is a leader in the use of computers in mathematics education and has been especially involved with the teaching of calculus. He maintains a heavily visited World Wide Web site that includes graphics and animations depicting things like the volume of water in a tipped glass or Archimedes's calculation of pi. (www.math.psu.edu/dna/graphics.html) He also is the author of an article on computer-assisted instruction in Encarta, a CD-ROM encyclopedia to be published in 1997 by Microsoft.
Arnold spearheaded the 1992 effort that led to the establishment of the McAllister Technology Classroom and was a principal member of a group that received a grant from IBM to establish two computer laboratory classrooms on campus. Arnold is the epitome of the outstanding university teacher, a colleague said. "He brings to his undergraduate teaching the same penetrating intelligence, boundless enthusiasm, and hard work that have made him an internationally recognized scholar. He proves that research and teaching are not mutually exclusive activities, as they are often portrayed, but rather symbiotic processes in which each reinforces the other."
Richard J. Cyr has taught biology courses to more than 7,000 students since coming to Penn State in 1989 and has personally orchestrated the total redesign of Penn State's general biology sequence into a series of four courses. The four-semester series allows deeper coverage of the subjects, introduces a writing component, and provides a more interactive and collaborative set of laboratory exercises.
A colleague said Cyr "is knowledgeable, he has a natural talent for describing and explaining difficult subjects, he has charisma, he cares deeply about student learning, and he devotes large amounts of his time to the undergraduate education mission of Penn State." Cyr says his philosophy of teaching is "to help students learn how to think, how to communicate what they understand, and how to obtain a basic core of knowledge in a given subject. These qualities can be taught at all levels and in different yet complementary ways." He is a coauthor of the general biology laboratory manual and a major participant in the Howard Hughes scholars program for outstanding undergraduates.