APPOINTMENTS AND AWARDS
Sidney Drell of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center is one of the three recipients of the prestigious Enrico Fermi Award, administered by the US Department of Energy for the White House. The award recognizes "his contributions to arms control and national security and to particle physics".
Drell served as SLAC's deputy director until 1998 and has since been a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He has been an advisor to the federal government on national security and defence technical issues, and he is a founding member of the high-level JASON US national advisory group.
The other two recipients of the award are Sheldon Datz of Oak Ridge and Herbert York of the University of California's Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation.
TRIUMF, Canada's National Laboratory for Particle and Nuclear Physics, has announced that its next director, following Alan Astbury's retirement in September, will be Alan Shotter, professor of experimental physics at Edinburgh and former head of the Department of Physics and Astronomy there.
Shotter has played a pioneering role in the use of radioactive ion beams for nuclear physics and astrophysics in Europe, and he will be leading the Canadian effort to exploit the new ISAC facility, which began operating at TRIUMF in late 1998 (see June 2000 News).
CERN physicist Luigi "Gigi" Rolandi has been nominated chairman of DESY's Physics Research Committee for a period of two years.
The Henryk Niewodniczanski Institute of Nuclear Physics in Cracow has bestowed the title of honorary professor on Douglas Morrison from CERN "in recognition of his outstanding achievements in experimental particle physics, his versatile and deep analysis of the most important problems of modern physics and other disciplines, and his major contribution to the development of the scientific collaboration between CERN and Polish research centres, in particular, the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Cracow".
At the ceremony on 16 October, Tomir Coghen, who worked with Morrison for many years, recalled a publication list contains more than 120 papers published with Cracow co-authors. The mention of 10.00 pm group meetings surprised many young attendees.
ICTP Trieste Dirac medallists get together
The end of last year marked the 15th anniversary of the institution of the award of the Dirac Medal of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics. During its short life, the Dirac Medal has become an extremely prestigious award and has it has managed to generate an impressive list of recipients.
Many of the medal winners attended the special anniversary meeting in Trieste and signed a statement of support, which read:
"On the occasion of the celebration marking the 15th anniversary of the Dirac Medal, during which the Abdus Salam ICTP has renewed its fruitful collaboration with the distinguished scientists awardees of the Dirac Medal, a Support Group of Dirac Medallists was constituted to sustain ICTP's mission to promote basic sciences in the developing countries and north-south collaboration.
In particular, the group members will:
1) provide advice when requested to the ICTP, help to increase the visibility of its activities, act as goodwill ambassadors and make a special effort to participate in programmes such as the Visiting Scholar programme;
2) propose nominations for the Dirac Medal Award reinforcing the well-established tradition of high scientific excellence and innovative impact."
