News

• December 20, 2010: Richard Muller (Miller Professor 1990) is featured in a UC Berkeley News Press Release about his new book The Instant Physicist: An Illustrated Guide.
  
  
• December 16, 2010: Joe Dufek (Miller Fellow 2006-2008) has been awarded the 2010 Hisashi Kuno Award.
  
  
• December 9, 2010: Barbara Romanowicz (Miller Professor Spring 2010) and Pascal Audet (Miller Fellow 2008-2011) both appeared in a UC Berkeley News Press Release about  research on tremor activity beneath the San Andreas Fault.
  
  
• November 18, 2010: Joel Fajans (Miller Fellow 1988-1989) has received publicity for his research on trapping antimatter.
  • National Geographic News
  • San Francisco Chronicle article
  • Daily Cal article
  • UC Berkeley News Press Release
    
    
• November 17, 2010: Bill Dietrich (Miller Professor 1998-1999) has been awarded the Arthur Holmes Union Medal and Honorary Membership of the EGU.
  
  
• November 17, 2010: Michael Manga (Miller Fellow 1994-1996, Miller Professor 2008-2009, Executive Director 2010-2011) has been awarded the Robert Wilhelm Bunsen Medal of the European Geosciences Union.
  
  
• November 5, 2010: Josh Shaevitz (Miller Fellow 2004-2007) has been awarded a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the US government's highest honor given to early-career scientists.
  
  
• October 26, 2010: Dan Rabosky (Miller Fellow 2009-2012) has been awarded the Young Investigator Award from the American Society of Naturalists.
  
  
• October 19, 2010: Randy Schekman (Miller Senior Fellow 2008-2013) has been awarded the Massry Prize.
  
  
• October 15, 2010: Feng Wang (Miller Fellow 2005-2008) has been awarded a Packard Fellowship for his work on graphene.
  
  
• October 13, 2010: Mark Hauber (Miller Fellow 2002 - 2005) was interviewed for an article in Nature Magazine entitled "Publications: Publish like a pro".
  
  
• September 28, 2010: Peter Schultz (Miller Professor Fall 1991) and Chang Liu (Miller Fellow 2009 - 2012) were both featured in a Science News article about their work on "unnatural selection".
  
  
• September 21, 2010: Jerry Marsden (Miller Professor 1981-1982), one of the original founders of reduction theory for mechanical systems with symmetry, passed away. He was 68.
  
  
• September 20, 2010: Mathematics prizes have been awarded to the following members:
  • Alexandre Chorin (Visiting Miller Professor 1971-1972, 1982-1983) - Lagrange Prize
  • James Sethian (Miller Professor Spring 2011) - Pioneer Prize
    
    
• August 24, 2010: Cédric Villani (Visiting Miller Professor Spring 2004) has been awarded the Fields Medal, one of the highest awards in the field of mathematics.
  
  
• August 9, 2010: Daniel Rokhsar (Miller Professor Spring 1997) received press coverage for his work on sequencing the genome of sponges, the simplest animal to have its genome sequenced.
  • UC Berkeley News
  • The Daily Cal
    
    
• July 29, 2010: Antonio Castro Neto (Visiting Miller Professor Spring 2010) and Alex Zettl (Miller Professor 1995, Spring 2007) are both authors of a report on a newly discovered property of graphene, which was discussed in a UC Berkeley News Press Release.
  
  
• July 25, 2010: Don Backer (Miller Professor Spring 2007), a leader in the field of radio astronomy, passed away at the age of 66.
  • UCB Obituary
  • San Francisco Chronicle Obituary
    
    
• July 23, 2010: Peidong Yang (Miller Professor Spring 2009) and Paul Alivisatos (Miller Professor 2001-2002) were both interviewed for a San Francisco Chronicle Blog that announced a $122 million grant to study ways to produce fuels from sunlight.
  
  
• July 20, 2010: Greg Crutsinger (Miller Fellow 2009-2012) has written an article for Seed Magazine in which he describes his work.
  
  
• July 19, 2010: Gerson Goldhaber (Miller Professor 1958-1959, 1975-1976, 1984-1985), who played a key role in many discoveries in the field of physics over the course of five decades, passed away at the age of 86
  • LBNL Obituary
  • San Francisco Chronicle Obituary
    
    
• July 13, 2010: Dustin Rubenstein (Miller Fellow 2006-2009) is one of the scientists whose field work is featured in the Scientist at Work Blog on the New York Times website.
  
  
• June 10, 2010: Maryam Modjaz (Miller Fellow 2007-2010) has been awarded the German Astronomical Society's 2010 Ludwig Biermann Award for outstanding young astronomers. Astronomy Department Press Release
  
  
• June 7, 2010: Yue Wu (Miller Fellow 2006-2009) has been awarded a DuPont Young Professor Grant.
  
  
• May 27, 2010: Raman Sanyal (Miller Fellow 2008-2011) has been awarded the Berlin Tiburtius Prize for his outstanding dissertation.
  
  
• May 18, 2010: Jasper Rine (Miller Professor Fall 1993) is featured in a College of Letters and Science Press Release about a program that gives incoming freshmen the opportunity to submit their DNA for analysis.
  
  
• May 17, 2010: Alex Filippenko (Miller Fellow 1984-1986, Miller Professor Spring 1996, Miller Professor Spring 2005) has been awarded the Emmons Award for excellence in the teaching of introductory astronomy for non-science majors.
  
  
• May 14, 2010: Barry Sinervo (Miller Fellow 1988-1990) was interviewed for a San Francisco Chronicle on the extinction of lizard populations.
  
  
• April 27, 2010: The Miller Institute would like to congratulate the following new members of the National Academy of Sciences: Full List
  
  
  • David Aldous, Foreign Associate, (Miller Professor Spring 1993)
  • Richard Eisenberg (Visiting Miller Professor Spring 2005)
  • James Haber (Visiting Miller Professor Spring 2005)
  • David Jablonski (Miller Fellow 1980 - 1982)
  • Michael Jordan (Miller Professor Fall 2008)
  • Steven Kivelson (Visiting Miller Professor Fall 1995)
  • Jonathan Lunine (Visiting Miller Professor Fall 2001)
  • Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe (Visiting Miller Professor Spring 2004)
    
    
• April 26, 2010: David Milstein (Visiting Miller Professor Spring 2006) has been awarded the Royal Society of Chemistry Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson Award.
  
  
• April 23, 2010: Ronald Hoy (Visiting Miller Professor Spring 2005) and Richard A. Muller (Miller Professor 1990) have both been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
  
  
• April 22, 2010: Leon Chua (Miller Professor 1976-1977) has won a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship award.
  
  
• March 30, 2010: Grigori Perelman (Miller Fellow 1993-1995) has won the Millennium Prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
  
  
• March 30, 2010: Nicholas Mathevon (Visiting Miller Professor Fall 2008) was featured in a UC Berkeley News Press Release about his research on hyena giggles.
  
  
• March 19, 2010: Yue Wu (Miller Fellow 2006-2009) has been awarded an Air Force Summer Faculty Fellowship.
  
  
• March 15, 2010: Alex Filippenko (Miller Fellow 1984-1986, Miller Professor Spring 1996, Spring 2005) and Sandra Faber (Visiting Miller Professor Spring 2005) were both quoted in a UC Berkeley News Press Release about a new Hubble Telescope project.
  
  
• March 8, 2010: Corrie Moreau's field work in Australia is featured in the expeditions section of the Field Museum of Chicago's website.
  
  
• March 5, 2010: Walter Alvarez's (Miller Professor 1986-1987, 2001-2002) theory on the mass extinction of the dinosaurs was discussed in San Francisco Chronicle article announcing acceptance of his theory by an international team of scientists.
  
  
• February 22, 2010: Hermann Grimmeiss (Visiting Miller Professor Spring 1991) received the Czochralski Award in Sept. 2009 and an "Honorary European Award" in May 2009.
  
  
• February 18, 2010: Dustin Rubenstein (Miller Fellow 2006-2009) was awarded the 2010 Ned K. Johnson Young Investigator Award by the American Ornithologists' Union.
  
  
• February 17, 2010: Eugene Haller (Miller Professor Fall 1990, Fall 2001) andMichael Jordan (Miller Professor Fall 2008) have been selected as two of the 68 new members of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).
  
  
• February 16, 2010: Yi Cui (Miller Fellow 2003-2005) was awarded a 2010 Sloan Research Fellowship.
  
  
• February 16, 2010: Todd Dawson's (Miller Professor Fall 2004) research on the decreasing levels of summer coastal fog in California has received media attention.
  • San Francisco Chronicle
  • USA Today
  • New York Times
  • UC Berkeley News
    
    
• February 5, 2010: Katherine Freese (Visiting Miller Professor Fall 2006) has been named a Fellow of the American Physical Society and is now George Eugene Uhlenbeck Professor of Physics at the University of Michigan.
  
  
• February 4, 2010: Daniel Rudolph (Miller Fellow 1976-1978) passed away due to Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. Obituary
  
  
• January 27, 2010: Axel Meyer (Visiting Miller Professor Spring 1996) was elected member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) this past year. He has also been awarded the Carus Medal of the Leopoldina (the German National Academy of Sciences) and the EMBO Prize for Communication in the Life Sciences.
  
  
• January 25, 2010: Stephen Leone (Miller Professor Spring 2010) has been selected as a member of the 2010 class of the Department of Defense's National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellowship (NSSEFF) program.
  
  
• January 21, 2010: Chris Greene (Visiting Miller Professor Spring 2007) has been awarded the 2010 Davisson-Germer Prize of the American Physical Society.

• December 21, 2012: Sandra Faber (Visiting Miller Professor Spring 2005), a UC Santa Cruz astronomy and astrophysics professor renowned for her work charting the properties of galaxies, has been awarded a National Medal of Science by President Barack Obama. The National Medal of Science is the U. S. government’s highest award for scientists.
  
  
• November 9, 2012: Richard Saykally (Miller Professor 1985-86; 1997-98; Fall 2006) was awarded the Faraday Lectureship Medal at an award ceremony of the Royal Society of Chemistry in Birmingham, UK, on November 9, 2012.  This medal, the UK’s top honor for physical chemistry, was awarded for “the development of powerful new spectroscopic technology and its application in pioneering studies of molecular ions, water clusters, liquid water and aqueous solutions and their surfaces.”
  
  
• October 2012: Bernard Sadoulet (Miller Professor, Spring 2011) was awarded the 2013 W.K.H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics for his pioneering work and leading role in the development and use of phonon detection techniques enabling direct searches for weakly interacting massive particles.”
  
  
• October 2012: Hermona Soreq (Visiting Miller Professor Spring 2009) has been awarded one of the European Research Council’s Advanced Awards for 2012. This highly competitive award, granted to 100 researchers within Europe, comes with a prize of 2.375 M Euros for five years.
  
  
• October 26, 2012: Mark Laidre (Miller Fellow 2010-2013) was featured in a Berkeley article entitled “Hermit crabs socialize to evict their neighbors.”
  
  
• September 16, 2012: Study leader Svante Pääbo (Visiting Miller Professor Spring 2013), a pioneer in decoding ancient genomes, said it would take biologists decades to understand all the meaning of all these tiny different. Dr. Pääbo and his coauthors have highlighted several intriguing genetic differences between modern humans and our primitive relatives that could be significant, including genes involved in wiring the brain and ones that are known to be linked to autism. Analysis of the genome and comparisons with ours and the Neanderthals' will odder insights into the history of Homo sapiens. More Information
  
  
• July 25, 2012:  Eliot Quataert (Miller Executive Committee 2012, Miller Professor 2009-2010) & Alice Guionnet (Visiting Miller Professor 2006); were awarded a $500,000 open-ended grant from the Simons Foundation to further their research. Dr. Quataert is a theoretical astrophysicist with interests in black holes, stellar physics, plasma astrophysics and galaxy formation, among other topics, and is the director of the UC Berkeley Theoretical Astrophysics Center. More Information
  
  
• July 24, 2012:  Josef Dufek (Miller Fellow 2006-2008) & David Shelly (Miller Fellow 2007-2008) were announced as the distinguished honorees of the James B. Macelwane Medal. “These individuals are recognized for their outstanding contributions to the advancement of Earth and space science and for their service to the scientific community. They have distinguished themselves through their extraordinary achievements and are role models for future generations of scientists.” More Information
  
  
• July 19, 2012:  Tanja Cuk (Miller Fellow 2007-2010), assistant professor of chemistry, “has received a Baker Fellowship to advance her research on ‘supercapacitors’. Cuk’s goal is a new generation of supercapacitors optimized for both power delivery and energy storage.” More information
  
  
• June 12, 2012:  Ray Jayawardhana (Miller Fellow 2000-2002), a professor and Canada Research Chair in observational astrophysics at the University of Toronto. He will deliver this year’s Whidden Lectureat McMaster: “Rocks, Ice and Penguins: Searching for Clues to Planetary Origins in Antarctica.” More information
  
  
• May 13, 2012: Gil Navon (Miller Professor Fall 1996, Fall 1997), Tel Aviv University, was awarded the Mif’al HaPayis Landau Prize for pioneering developments in magnetic resonance imaging.
  
  
• May 1, 2012: The American Academy of Arts and Sciences announced the election of new members, which include the following former Miller Institute Members: AAAS
  • Miller Professors:
    • Bjorn M. Poonen (Fall 2005)
    • Bernard Sadoulet (Spring 2011)
    • Peidong Yang (Spring 2009)


  • Visiting Miller Professors:
    • Philip H. Bucksbaum (Fall 1996)
    • John B. Pendry (Fall 1991)
    • Richard L. Taylor (Spring 1999)
• May 1, 2012: The National Academy of Sciences announced the election of members, which include the following former Miller Institute Members: NAS
  • Miller Fellows:
    • William Bialek (1986-1987)
    • Guinevere Kauffmann (1993-1994)


  • Miller Professors:
    • John Clarke (1975-1976, Fall 1994 & 2007)
    • Mary Power (Spring 2002)
    • Bernard Sadoulet (Spring 2011)
  • Visiting Miller Professors:
    • Matthew Fisher (Spring 1991)
    • John F. Hartwig (Fall 2009)
      
      
• April 17, 2012: Professor Barbara Romanowicz (Miller Professor Spring 2010) received The Reid Medal at the April 17, 2012 annual meeting of the SSA in San Diego, California. The Harry F. Reid Medal is the highest honor of the Seismological Society of America (SSA). The Reid Medal is awarded for "outstanding contributions to seismology and earthquake engineering." Dr. Romanowicz was honored as an exceptional scientist who has made fundamental contributions to theoretical seismology, seismology infrastructure and global geodynamics. More information
  
  
• March 8, 2012: Rich Saykally (Miller Professor 1985-86, 1997-98, Fall 2006, Executive Committee) was awarded the 2012 Royal Society of Chemistry Faraday Lectureship Prize. The RSC is the largest organization in Europe for advancing the chemical sciences. More information
  
  
• March 5, 2012: Nicholas P. Jewell (Miller Professor Fall 1994, Fall 2004), professor of biostatistics and statistics at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, was awarded the Harvard School of Public Health’s 2012 Marvin Zelen Leadership Award in Statistical Science.
  
  
• March 5, 2012: Marvin L. Cohen (Miller Professor 1969-70, 1976-77 &1988) Carnegie Mellon University will award its 2011 Dickson Prize in Science to Marvin L. Cohen, one of the most influential condensed matter physicists in the world.
  
  
• February 21, 2012: James Sethian (Miller Professor Spring 2011) and Robert Saye, mathematicians who both hold joint appointments with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley, have won the 2011Cozzarelli Prize for the best scientific paper in the category of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Their winning paper, “The Voronoi Implicit Interface Method for computing multiphase physics,” introduces a robust, accurate and efficient numerical method for tracking large numbers of interacting and evolving regions (phases) whose motions are determined by complex interactions of geometry, physics, constraints and internal boundary conditions. More information
  
  
• February 3, 2012: Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau (Advisory Board Member) is the recipient of the 2012 Clifford G. Shull Prize of the Neutron Scattering Society of America (NSSA) with the citation: “For his seminal scientific, tireless leadership, and devoted mentoring in the field of neutron scattering.”
  
  
• February 2012: Sébastien Merkel (Miller Fellow 2004 - 2006) was awarded the 2011 European Mineralogical Society Research Excellence Medal.

• December 6, 2011: Nicholas McConnell, a University of California, Berkeley Astronomy graduate student and his professor Chung-Pei Ma (Miller Professor Fall 2010) discovered two enormous black holes: two objects in distant space whose center is more than 300 million light years away from Earth. This week the report of their discovery was published in the journal Nature.
  
  
• October 4, 2011: Saul Perlmutter (Senior Miller Fellow), a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a faculty senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), led the Supernova Cosmology Project that, in 1998, discovered that galaxies are receding from one another faster now than they were billions of years ago. He will share the prize with Adam G. Riess (Miller Fellow 1996-1998, and Brian Schmidt. Nobelprize.org press release
  
  
• October 2011: David Shelly (Miller Fellow 2007-2008) and Feng Wang (Miller Fellow 2005-2008) among Early-Career Scientists awarded by White House. “President Obama today named 94 researchers as recipients of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers, the  highest honor bestowed by the United States government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers.” More
  
  
• September 30, 2011: Gabor Somorjai (Miller Professor 1977-1978, Miller Senior Fellow 2009-2014) has been awarded the Honda Foundation’s Home Prize 2011 for his pioneering contributions to surface science.
  
  
• September 29, 2011: Peidong Yang (Miller Professor 2009) won the MRS Medal for "outstanding contributions in the creative synthesis and assembly of semiconductor nanowires and their heterostructures, and innovations in nanowire-based photonics, thermoelectrics, solar energy conversion and nanofluidic applications."
  
  
• September 29, 2011: Paul Alivisatos (Miller Professor 2001) won the Von Hippel Award, the Materials Research Society's highest honor, "for the development of the fundamental scientific basis for growing and utilizing defect-free colloidal semiconductor nanoparticles, providing the basis for biological imaging, solid state lighting and the capture and conversion of solar energy to electricity."
  
  
• September 26, 2011: Dr. Grigory Perelman (Miller Fellow 1993-1994) was featured in an article concerning the Clay Chair at the Institut Henri Poincaré. “The Chair is financed for   a period of five years with the Clay Millennium Prize funds for resolution of the Poincaré conjecture. The conjecture was solved in the affirmative by Grigory Perelman...In establishing this chair with IHP, CMI aims to provide an exceptional opportunity for mathematicians of great promise to   develop their ideas and pursue their research, just as Grigory Perelman was afforded such an opportunity by a fellowship at the Miller Institute in 1993-95. Clay Mathematics Institute
  
  
• September 8, 2011: Corrie Moreau (Miller Fellow 2007-2008), was featured in a graphic novel (pdf) about her life and work, part of The Romance of Ants, a temporary exhibition at The Field Museum in Chicago (July 30, 2010 to January 1, 2012) that she curated.
  
  
• August 2011: Jillian Banfield (Miller Professor 2006-2007), featured in Innovations: Research & News from Berkeley Engineering and UC Berkeley News Center, was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Earth and Environmental Science and L’Oreal-UNESCO for Women in Science award - for groundbreaking work on how microbes alter rocks and interact with the natural world.
  
  
• July 11, 2011: Randy W. Schekman (Miller Senior Fellow 2008-2013), featured in Howard Hughs Medial Institute News, was named the first editor of a new journal that the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society, and the WellcomeTrust aim to launch next year.
  
  
• June 10, 2011: Gabor Somorjai (Miller Professor 1977-1978), Miller Senior Fellow 2009-2014) has been awarded the Eni Award as well as the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences.
  
  
• June 7, 2011: The Miller Institute was featured in a Physics Today Blog post concerning the annual Miller Institute Symposium.
  
  
• June 6, 2011: Heino Falcke (Visiting Miller Professor Fall 2006) has been awarded the Spinoza Prize from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NOW).
  
  
• June 1, 2011: Marc Davis (Miller Professor 1986-1987, Spring 2000) has been awarded the Gruber Cosmology Prize for his work on dark matter.
  
  
• May 25, 2011: David Chandler (Miller Professor Fall 1991, Miller Professor 1999-2000, Executive Committee 2002-2008)has been elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London
  --LBNL Press Release
  
  
• May 17, 2011: Paul Licht (Miller Professor 1973-1974) was featured in a UC Berkeley News Center article concerning the new Illustrated Guide to Common Animals of the East Bay Hills.
  
  
• May 17, 2011: Eva Schmid (Miller Fellow, 2008-2011) was featured in Austrian newspaper Der Standard for her research on membrane composition.
  
  
• May 12, 2011: Ray Jayawardhana (Miller Fellow 2000-2002) and Anne Pringle (Miller Fellow 2001-2004) have been awarded Radcliffe Institute Fellowships.
  
  
• May 2, 2011: Bin Yu (Miller Professor Spring 2004) has been invited to deliver the 2012 Turkey Memorial Lecture in Statistics at the 8th World Congress in Probability and Statistics, the quadrennial joint conference of the Bernoulli Society and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. The Turkey Lecturer is chosen every four years by the Bernoulli Society Subcommittee on Named Lectures for the World Congress; it is one of the highest academic honors bestowed by the Bernoulli Society.
  
  
• April 28, 2011: Jasper Rine (Executive Committee 2010-2011, Miller Professor Fall 1993) was featured in ScienceMatters@Berkeley in an article about his research on the human genome.
  
  
• April 21, 2011: Prashant Jain (Miller Fellow, 2008-2011) was featured in a Daily Cal article concerning his research on plasmonics.
  
  
• April 19: 2011: The following Miller Members have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences:
  • Anna Behrensmeyer (Miller Fellow 1973–1975)
  • Glenn Fredrickson (Visiting Miller Professor Fall 1993)
  • Martin Head-Gordon (Miller Professor 2001–2002)
  • Michael Jordan (Miller Professor Fall 2008)
    
    
• April 7, 2011: Bjorn Poonen (Miller Professor Fall 2005) was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
  
  
• April 4, 2011: Oliver Chadwick (Visiting Miller Professor Fall 1994), Liu Chen (Visiting Miller Professor Fall 1987), and Allen Goldstein (Miller Professor Spring 2011) have been elected fellows of the American Geophysical Union.
  
  
• March 29, 2011: Saul Perlmutter (Miller Senior Fellow 2010-2015) is one of this year's two speakers at the annual UC Berkeley Faculty Research Lectures.
  
  
• March 17, 2011: Robert Ritchie (Miller Fellow 1974-1976) is featured in a video on Smart Planet about metallic glass.
  
  
• March 15, 2011: Jillian Banfield (Miller Professor 2006-2007) has been awarded a 2011 L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Award.
  
  
• March 3, 2011: Donald DePaolo (Miller Professor 1997-1998) was interviewed for a UCB News Center article on the life history of a 4.5 billion-year meteorite.
  
  
• February 27, 2011: David Milstein (Visiting Miller Professor Spring 2006) has been awarded a Meitner Humboldt Research Award.
  
  
• February 24, 2011: Sandra Faber (Visiting Miller Professor Spring 2005) has been named as one of the 2011 "Women of Influence" in the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal. UCSC Press Release
  
  
• February, 24, 2011: Louise Glass was featured in a Daily Cal article about her Miller Professorship award.
  
  
• February 22, 2011: Connie Chang-Hasnain (Miller Professor 2003-2004) has been awarded the 2011 David Sarnoff Award from the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
  
  
• February 20, 2011: Michael Marletta (Visiting Miller Professor Fall 2000) has been named president of The Scripps Research Institute, effective January 1, 2012. Press Release
  
  
• February 19, 2011: Saul Perlmutter (Miller Senior Fellow 2010-2015) and Adam Reiss (Miller Fellow 1996-1998) share this year's Albert Einstein Medal.
  • LBNL Press Release
  • Berkeleyside article
  • Baltimore Sun article
  • Johns Hopkins University Gazette
    
    
• February 18, 2011: Elchanan Mossel (Miller Fellow 2002-2005) and Dmitry Budker (Miller Professor 2002-2003) were both featured in the January/February edition of ScienceMatters@Berkeley.
  
  
• February 17, 2011: Ray Jayawardhana (Miller Fellow 2000-2002) just published a book written for a popular audience entitled Strange New Worlds: The Search for Alien Planets and Life beyond Our Solar System. The book tour includes events in Boston, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Pasadena, Seattle, London, Melbourne and Toronto.
  
  
• February 15, 2011: Joshua Eisner (Miller Fellow 2005-2008) and Jiaxing Huang (Miller Fellow 2004-2007) have both been awarded Sloan Fellowships.
  
  
• February 10, 2011: Laurence Barron (Visiting Miller Professor Spring 1995) has been awarded the 2011 Chirality Medal, instituted by the Societa ChimicaItaliana.
  
  
• February 8, 2011: Jitendra Malik (Miller Professor Fall 2001) has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering. Press Release
  
  
• February 2, 2011: Alexander Levitzki (Visiting Miller Professor Spring 2008) has been elected to the Academia Europaea (the Academy of Europe).
  
  
• February 2011: Josef Dufek (Miller Fellow 2006-2008) was bestowed the George Walker Award. "The award recognizes achievements of recent outstanding graduate in the fields of research encompassed by IAVCEI, or also a recent graduate whose achievements in volcanology involved operating in difficult circumstances" IAVCEI.
  
  
• January 31, 2011: John Taylor (Miller Professor Fall 1999) and Louise Glass (Miller Professor 2011-2012) were both featured in a UC Berkeley News Center article on the analysis of bread mold genomes.
  
  
• January 31, 2011: The College of Natural Resources announced Louise Glass (Miller Professor 2011-2012) as the recipient of a Miller Professorship award. Press Release
  
  
• January 28, 2011: Gabor Somorjai (Miller Professor 1977-1978, Miller Senior Fellow 2009-2014) has been awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award "for his pioneering experimental and conceptual contributions to the understanding of surface chemistry and catalysis at a microscopic and molecular level." Press Release
  
  
• January 28, 2011: Peidong Yang (Miller Professor Spring 2009) is featured in a College of Chemistry press release for his role in the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis.
  
  
• January 28, 2011: Mark Hauber (Miller Fellow 2002-2005) was featured in a Nature article, giving advice to graduate students and postdocs, about writing for the peer reviewed literature.
  
  
• January 18, 2011: Sandra Faber (Visiting Miller Professor Spring 2005) has been awarded the 2011 Henry Norris Russell Lectureship from the American Astronomical Society.
  
  
• January 11, 2011: The following Miller members have been named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS):
  • Tamara Doering (Miller Fellow 1993-1995)
  • Michael J. Frisch (Miller Fellow 1983–1985)
  • Gerald McClearn (Miller Professor 1962-1963)
  • Hongkun Park (Visiting Miller Professor Fall 2003)
  • Eugene Wong (Miller Professor 1983 – 1984)
  • Patricia Zambryski(Miller Professor 2004–2005)
    
    
• January 7, 2011: Bjorn Poonen (Miller Professor Fall 2005) was awarded the 2011 Chauvenet Prize (the mathematical analogue of the Pulitzer Prize).

 

Below is a list of our Miller members who have recently received awards or who have been highlighted in the media. Also, the Miller Newsletters is another way to find out what is currently happening in our Miller Community.

• Randy Schekman (Miller Senior Fellow 2008-2013)

  has won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his role in revealing the machinery that regulates the transport and secretion of proteins in our cells... Discoveries by Schekman about how yeast secrete proteins led directly to the success of the biotechnology industry, which was able to coax yeast to release useful protein drugs... Schekman is UC Berkeley's 22nd Nobel Laureate, and the first to receive the prize in the area of physiology or medicine... Read More 1 | Read More 2
  
  
• Adrian Bejan (Miller Fellow 1976-1978)

  was selected to become a member of the Academia Europaea, the Academy of Europe. Read More
  
  
• Linyou Cao (Miller Fellow 2010-2013)

  is the recipient of ARO YIP Award: The Young Investigator from the Army Research Office. The award of $150,000 over three years will be used to support Cao's research work on the electron-phonon coupling in two-dimensional materials. The results from Cao's research has the potential to lead to next generation lasers, light emission diodes, and photo detectors that are important for defense needs. Read More
  
  
• Roland Burgmann (Miller Professor Spring 2014)
  
was honored as a fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). This honor is bestowed upon members of the union who have made exceptional scientific contributions and attained acknowledged eminence in the fields of Earth and space science. Read More
  
  
• Robert Bergman (Miller Professor 1982-1983, Fall 1993, Spring 2000)

  will be honored at the 2014 Reactions Mechanism Conference for his "achievements and contributions to organic chemistry". Read More
  
  
• Geoff Marcy (Miller Professor 2011-2012)
  
is highlighted at the UC Berkeley News Center in an article titled, "Astronomers answer key question: How common are habitable planets?" They will publish their analysis and findings in the online early edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Read More
  
  
• Edward Frenkel (Miller Professor Spring 2013)
  
Edward Frenkel's new book aims to show the beauty of mathematics, inspire awe at its power, and challenge his colleagues to wield it for good. His new book is Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality. Read More
  
  
• Terence Speed (Miller Professor Spring 2005)
  
has been awarded the Australian 2013 Prime Minister's Prize for Science for fighting cancer with statistics. Read More
  
  
• Nicholas Jewell (Miller Professor Fall 1994 & Fall 2004)
  
has been awarded the Berkeley Faculty Service Award. The Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate awarded him for outstanding and dedicated service to the Berkeley campus. Read More
  
  
• Julius Lucks (Miller Fellow 2007-2010)

  was awarded the NIH New Innovators Award. The award is accompanied by a five-year, $1.5 million research grant under the NIH's "High Risk High Reward" grant program. More details at: Cornell Chronicle or Read More
  
  
• Richard Saykally (Miller Professor 1985-1986, 1997-1998, Fall 2006)

  and his research team have shown that when hydrated in water, positively charged ions can actually pair up with one another. Read More

  
  
• Jeremy Thorner (Miller Professor 1984-1985, 1999-2000)

  has been chosen to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Genetics Society of America sponsored Yeast Genetics and Molecular Biology Meeting that will be held in the Summer of 2014. Professor Thorner was selected in recognition of his many scientific contributions and outstanding community service.
  
  
• Alexei Filippenko (Miller Fellow 1984-1986, Miller Professor Spring 1996 & 2005)
  
Filippenko will be presenting a talk at the 49th Annual Nobel Conference - "The Universe at its Limits" - at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota on October 1, 2013. Read More
  
  
• Ray Jayawardhana (Miller Fellow 2000-2002)
was awarded The Rutherford Memorial Medal in Physics. He is a recognized leader in the study of extra-solar planets, brown dwarfs and young stars. A prolific and innovative scientist, he has employed many of the world's largest telescopes to further our understanding of the origin, evolution and diversity of planetary systems. His pivotal and wide-ranging contributions include several high-profile discoveries related to sub-stellar astrophysics and planet formation. Read More
  
  
• 

Barbara Romanowicz (Miller Professor Spring 2010)
  
is a UC Berkeley professor of earth and planetary sciences and a researcher at the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory who said about her study in a news article: "Our new finding helps bridge the gap between processes deep in the mantle and phenomenon observed on the earth's surface, such as hotspots." Read More
  
  
• 

Chris McKee (Miller Professor 1984-1985, Fall 1999 & Fall 2004) &
  
Phil Marcus (Miller Professor 2005-2006)
  
"Klein and McKee have worked over the last decade to calculate the crucial first steps of star formation, which describes the collapse of giant gas clouds into Frisbee-like disks. They will collaborate with Marcus's team by providing them with their computed velocities, temperatures and densities of the disks that surround protostars. This collaboration will allow Marcus's team to study the formation and march of zombie vortices in a more realistic model of the disk." Read More


  
  
• Paul Alivisatos (Miller Professor 2001-2002)

  Chemist Paul Alivisatos, one of the pioneers of nanoscience, has been appointed to the Samsung Distinguished Chair in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology at UC Berkeley in recognition of his many scientific achievements. Read More


  
  
• Philip Chang (Miller Fellow 2005-2008)

  was awarded the NSF Career award for his work on blazars. Read More


  
  
• David Jenkins (Miller Fellow 2005-2008)

  was awarded the NSF Career grant for work on catalytic aziridination. Read More
  
  
• 

Saul Perlmutter (Miller Senior Fellow 2010-2015)
  
Saul Perlmutter (Berkeley physicist and Nobel laureate) was profiled in the July 6 issue of the England's The Guardian - part of a series on "rational heroes." Read More 


  
  
• Mikhail Shapiro (Miller Fellow 2011-2014) &
  
Greg Bowman (Miller Fellow 2011-2014) won Borroughs Welcomme CASI awards. 


  
  
• Alexander Hayes (Miller Fellow 2011-2014) 

  received the Ronald Greeley Early Career Award, American Geophysical Union in recognition for significant early career contributions in planetary science. He also received the NASA Early Career Fellow.


  
  
• Daniela Kaufer (Miller Professor Fall 2012) &

  Feng Wang (Miller Fellow 2005-2008) 

  Daniela Kaufer and Feng Wang have both been awarded Bakar Fellowships. The Bakar Fellows Program is a unique UC Berkeley initiative to support innovative research by early career faculty, in particular those who want to focus on a project that has real-world applications in areas ranging from health care and agriculture to high-tech and biotech. Read More
  
  
• Steven Balbus (Visiting Miller Professor Spring 2012)
Steven Balbus received the 2013 Shaw Prize in Astronomy... "for their discovery and study of the magnetorotational instability, and for demonstrating that this instability leads to turbulence and is a viable mechanism for angular momentum transport in astrophysical accretion disks." Read More
  
  
• NAS: The National Academy of Sciences announced the election of new members and foreign associates in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. The honorees include five former Miller Institute members:

  
  Kenneth A. Farley
  
+ Visiting Miller Professor Sp03

  Sarah P. Otto

  + Miller Fellow 1992-94

  James A. Sethian
  
+ Miller Professor Sp11

  Eva Tardos
  
+ Visiting Miller Professor Fa99

  John B. Pendry
  
+ Visiting Miller Professor Fa91

  
  
• AAAS: Seven former Miller Institute members have been named members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a prestigious 233-year-old national honorary society of leaders from academia, business, public affairs and the humanities. The academy announced the names of its 198 new members on Wednesday, April 24 at its headquarters in Cambridge, MA. The 2013 members include:
  
  
Jitendra Malik

  + Miller Professor Fa01
  
Hitoshi Murayama

  + Miller Professor Sp06
T.
  Don Tilley
  
+ Miller Professor 2004-05
  
Bin Yu
  
+ Miller Professor Sp04
  
Shaul Mukamel

  + Visiting Miller Professor Sp96

  Marc Kamionkowski

  + Visiting Miller Professor Fa10

  Arunava Majumdar

  + Miller Professor 2003-04

  
  
• Randy Schekman (Miller Senior Fellow 2008-2013) & 

  Terence Speed (Miller Professor Spring 2005)
  
Both Randy Schekman and Terence Speed have been elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society. The backbone of the Society is its Fellowship, which is made up of the most eminent scientists, engineers and technologists from the UK and the Commonwealth. Fellows and Foreign Members are elected for life through a peer review process on the basis of excellence in science. Read More

  
  
• Alexander Levitzki (Visiting Miller Professor Spring 2008)
  
April 2013: Alexander Levitzki received the (AACR) American Association for Cancer Research's 2013 Award for Outstanding Achievement in Chemistry in Cancer Research for his contributions to signal transduction therapy and his work on the development of tyrosine kinase inhibitors as effective agents against cancer. Levitzki is a professor in the Department of Biological Chemistry at Hebrew University. Read More


  
  2012: Last year, Alexander Levitzki also received the 2012 Nauta Award for outstanding achievements in the field of Medicinal Chemistry by the European Federation for Medicinal Chemistry (EFMC). Prof. Levitzki's research focuses on cell signaling pathways with a special emphasis on the role of tyrosine kinases. He has pioneered the therapeutic concept that tyrosine kinase function can be selectively modulated by small molecule inhibitors, in face of worldwide skepticism whether sufficient selectivity can be obtained. Read More
  
  
• Eric Agol (Visiting Miller Professor Spring 2011)

  April 2013: Eric Agol has discovered one of two exoplanets that Geoffrey Marcy (Miller Professor 2011-2012) regards as "tantalizingly similar to Earth". These two "are the best candidates yet for the possibility of life". Read More


  
  
• Daniela Kaufer (Miller Professor Fall 2012)

  April 2013: Kaufer's research on stress was funded by a BRAINS (Biobehavioral Research Awards for Innovative New Scientists) award from the National Institute of Mental Health of the NIH and the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression. Chronic stress is known to cause major health problems, but acute stress is thought to improve people's performance and health. A new study by UC Berkeley professor, and Miller Professor Daniela Kaufer shows why that is. Stress generates new nerve cells in the brain that, two weeks later, help people learn better. Read More
  
  
• 

Eric King (Miller Fellow 2010-2013)

  April 2013: Former Miller Fellow, Eric King, on new discoveries about liquid metals and their implications in the study of magnetic fields. His work was posted in a PNAS article: "Planets' magnetic fields come from more complex inner flows than thought." Read More


  
  
• Grigori Perelman (Miller Fellow 1993-1995)

  January 2013: The Poincaré Chair recognizes former Miller Fellow, Grigori Perelman, and the Miller Institute as it seeks talented young mathematicians. Read More


  
  
• John Lott (Visiting Miller Professor Spring 2005)

  January 2013: Awarded the NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing for the explication of Perelman's celebrated solution of the Poincare Conjecture. Read More
  
  
• Tamas Hausel (Miller Fellow 1999-2002)

  Awarded one of the 2012 European Research Council's Advanced Grant (worth 1.3 million euros). Read More


  
  
• Gabor Somorjai (Miller Professor 1977-1978, Miller Senior Fellow 2009-2014)
  
January 2013: Awarded the 2013 National Academy of Sciences Award in Chemical Sciences. This award, which honors innovative research in the chemical sciences, was awarded for the "groundbreaking experimental and conceptual contributions to the understanding of surface chemistry and catalysis at a microscopic and molecular level." Read More
  
  
• 

Sandra Faber (Visiting Miller Professor Spring 2005)

  December 2012: Awarded a National Medal of Science. This award is considered the U.S. government's highest award for scientists. She was awarded for "work charting the properties of galaxies." Read More 


  
  
• Jesse Thaler (Miller Fellow 2006-2009) &
  
Julius Lucks (Miller Fellow 2007-2010)

  Both awarded the prestigious Sloan Foundation Fellowships. These two-year fellowships are awarded yearly to 126 researchers in recognition of distinguished performance and a unique potential to make substantial contributions to their field. Read More


  
  
• Ian Agol (Miller Professor Fall 2012)
  
December 2012: Wins 2013 AMS Oswald Veblen Prize. The Veblen Prize is given every three years for an outstanding publication in geometry or topology that has appeared in the preceding six years. Agol is honored for his many fundamental contributions to hyperbolic geometry, 3-manifold topology, and geometric group theory. Read More 


  
  
• Alexander Engstroem (Miller Fellow 2009-2012)
  
Awarded 25000 EUR for research expenses through "The Ruth and Nils-Erik Stenback Prize" awarded by the Finnish Society of Science and Letters. The celebration will be held on April 29 to recognize 175 years of the Finnish Society of Science and Letters.


  
  
• Juan Ignacio Cirac Sasturain (Visiting Miller Professor Spring 2014)

  Awarded the Wolf Prize in Physics... often considered the most prestigious award in those fields after the Nobel Prize. He was awarded for groundbreaking theoretical contributions to quantum information processing, quantum optics and the physics of quantum gases. Read More