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News from ICTP 97 - Dateline
Indian-born Jagadish Shukla, one of the driving forces
behind the creation of ICTP's Physics of Weather and Climate Group,
has been awarded the first Sir Gilbert Walker Gold Medal from
the Indian Meteorological Society. The award honours international
scientists who have made significant contributions to monsoon
studies. Shukla is head of the Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere
Studies and the School of Computational Science at George Mason
University (USA). Shukla returns to ICTP this summer as one of
the directors of the summer colloquium on the physics of weather
and climate.
Cuban-born TRIL (Training and Research in Italian Laboratories) Fellow Carlos Alonso has received a national award for his research article, "Applications of Innovative Technology for Understanding the Geochronology of Marine Sediments." Alonso, who works at the Centre of Environmental Studies in Cienfuegos, Cuba, shared the prize with his colleague Misael Diaz, who hails from the same institution. Their findings were presented at the Ninth National Cuban Exposition, "Forging the Future." Research for the paper was conducted at the Marine Environment Research Centre of the Italian Commission for New Technologies, Energy and the Environment (ENEA) during Alonso's tenure as a TRIL Fellow in 1999-2000.
Two scientists, well known to ICTP, were among 15 new foreign associates named to the US National Academy of Sciences:
Jacob Palis (Instituto de Matematica Pura e Aplicada, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) has been a member of the ICTP Scientific Council since 1989 and course director of the schools and workshops on dynamical systems since 1983;
Partha Dasgupta (University of Cambridge, UK) was a
lecturer at the School on the Mathematics of Economics--A Primer
in Economics for Physicists and Mathematicians in 1998. The US
National Academy of Sciences, one of the world's most prestigious
science academies, now has 325 foreign associates and 1874 members
overall.
Sheng-Li Tan (East China Normal University, Shanghai, China) and T.N. Venkataramana (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, India) will share the ICTP Prize for 2000, which will be given in honour of the famed German mathematician Friedrich Hirzebruch. Sheng-Li Tan has made significant contributions to algebraic geometry, particularly to the theory of algebraic surfaces. T.N. Venkataramana has made significant contributions to the theory of discrete groups. The date of the award ceremony, which will take place in Trieste, will be announced later this year.
Jogesh Pati, professor of physics at the University of Maryland at College Park, USA, received the 2000 Dirac Medal during a ceremony held on 21 June in the ICTP Main Lecture Hall. Pati, a long-time collaborator of ICTP's founding director Abdus Salam, was awarded the medal for his "pioneering contributions to the quest for a unified theory of quarks and leptons and of the strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions."
The other Dirac Medallists 2000 who shared the prize with Pati--Howard Georgi, professor of physics at Harvard University, Cambridge, USA, and Helen Quinn, staff scientist in theoretical physics, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Menlo Park, USA (in the photo with ICTP director Miguel Virasoro)--were honoured on 3 July. The ceremonies took place in conjunction with the ICTP Summer School in Particle Physics.
Walter Kohn, 1998 Nobel Laureate for Chemistry, gave a special ICTP/SISSA condensed matter seminar on 22 June. Kohn, who was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1923, became a naturalised US citizen in 1957 after escaping Nazi Germany in the late 1930s and earning university degrees in Canada and the United States in the 1940s. Renowned for his work as a condensed matter theorist, Kohn has made seminal contributions to our understanding of the electronic function of materials. He played a leading role in the development of density functional theory, which has proved an invaluable concept for physicists, chemists and material scientists. Kohn is also founding director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. Since 1985, Kohn has visited the Centre seven times.
The Department for Research Cooperation of the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida-SAREC) organised the Workshop on Future Development of Support to Basic Sciences in Developing Countries on the ICTP campus from 13-15 June. Participants included representatives from ICTP, the Third World Academy of Sciences (TWAS), Third World Organization for Women in Science (TWOWS), International Foundation for Science (IFS), and International Science Programme (ISP) at Uppsala University in Sweden. A unique interactive electronic environment enabled participants to record their ideas and opinions instantaneously on laptop computers. Sida-SAREC hopes to use the information and opinions generated at the workshop in a broad-based reassessment of its basic science programmes scheduled to take place next year.
Jean Bio Chabi Orou, newly appointed Senior Associate (2001-2006) from the Institut de Mathematiques et de Sciences Physiques (IMSP), in Porto Novo, Benin, has been named Benin's Minister of Education. Chabi Orou, 45, received his doctorate degree from IMSP in 1994. As a participant in ICTP's "sandwich programme," he pursued a portion of his Ph.D. studies at Florida State University (USA). Chabi Orou's research fields include condensed matter physics and physics of the environment. In his capacity as minister, he assumes primary responsibility for the nation's overall policies and programmes concerning primary and secondary education.
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