An Achievement Prize for outstanding work in the accelerator field with no age limit:

Steve Myers, European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Geneva

Citation: "for his numerous outstanding contributions to the design, construction, commissionimg, performance optimization, and upgrade of energy-frontier colliders - in particular ISR, LEP, and LHC - and to the wider development of accelerator science"

A Prize for an individual, having made significant, original contributions to the accelerator field with no age limit:

Jie Wei, Tsinghua University in Beijing

Citation: "for his exceptionally creative contributions to the design, construction and commissioning of circular accelerators, in particular RHIC, SNS, LHC, as well as the design of CSNS, and for numerous significant developments in the field of beam dynamics"

A Prize for an individual, in the early part of his or her career, having made a recent significant, original contribution to the accelerator field:

Mei Bai, Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), Long Island, New York

Citation: "for her significant contributions to spin dynamics and polarized proton acceleration in circular accelerators - in particular AGS and RHIC, and to successful polarized proton beam collisions at 500 GeV centre of mass"

Shepard develops methods that describe the quantum mechanical behavior of the electrons in molecular systems.

His computer codes are used to predict chemical reaction rates, branching ratios, product yields, equilibrium constants, spectroscopic constants and other properties of chemical interest for hydrocarbon combustion and atmospheric chemical reactions, particularly those involving highly reactive radical intermediates.

This year, 531 members have been named Fellows of AAAS. New Fellows will be presented with an official certificate and a gold and blue (representing science and engineering, respectively) rosette pin on February 20 at the AAAS Fellows Forum during the 2010 AAAS Annual Meeting in San Diego.

The tradition of AAAS Fellows began in 1874. Currently, members can be considered for the rank of Fellow if nominated by the steering groups of the Association's 24 sections, or by any three Fellows who are current AAAS members (so long as two of the three sponsors are not affiliated with the nominee's institution), or by the AAAS chief executive officer.

Each steering group then reviews the nominations of individuals within its respective section and a final list is forwarded to the AAAS Council, which votes on the aggregate list.

The Council is the policymaking body of the association, chaired by the AAAS president, and consists of the members of the board of directors, the retiring section chairs, delegates from each electorate and each regional division and two delegates from the National Association of Academies of Science.

Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nation's first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific problems, advance America 's scientific leadership and prepare the nation for a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the world's largest general scientific society and publishes the journal Science, as well as Science Translational Medicine and Science Signaling. AAAS was founded in 1848 and includes some 262 affiliated societies and academies of science, serving 10 million individuals worldwide. Science has the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general science journal in the world, with an estimated total readership of one million. The non-profit AAAS is open to all and fulfills its mission to "advance science and serve society" through initiatives in science policy, international programs, science education, and more. For the latest research news, log onto EurekAlert!, the premier science-news Web site and a service of AAAS.

Kao's research interests have focused on developing new experimental techniques using synchrotron light at Brookhaven Lab's NSLS, a facility where, each year, approximately 2,100 scientists from around the world use x-rays, infrared light and ultraviolet light to study materials as diverse as computer chips and viruses. Specifically, Kao has developed x-ray techniques to study superconductors, materials that have no electrical resistance at very low temperatures; magnetic materials for storage devices in computers; and electronic structures of materials under high temperature and high pressure.

As chair of the NSLS, Kao manages a staff of about 170, and he has organized a large community of scientists to address scientific opportunities that he has identified. He also undertook major upgrades to the scientific programs and experimental facilities at the NSLS. In addition, he developed potential science programs for NSLS-II, Brookhaven's new light source that is currently under construction.

"I am honored to receive this distinction from the AAAS," Kao said. "It is a privilege to work with the talented and dedicated staff of the NSLS, and I am looking forward to continuing our productive scientific programs at NSLS-II."

In 1988, Kao earned a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Cornell University and joined Brookhaven Lab as a postdoctoral research associate. He worked his way up the ranks to become a senior physicist in 2001, and, in that same year, he was named associate chair for user science at the NSLS. In 2005, he was promoted to deputy chair of the NSLS, and in 2006, he became interim chair and then chair. In 2008, he became director of the Joint Photon Sciences Institute at Brookhaven Lab, an interdisciplinary research institute that uses advanced light sources to address challenging problems in science and technology. Kao has been an adjunct professor in the Physics Department at Stony Brook University since 2003.

Thomas Ludlam is cited for "the establishment of the scientific program of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider [RHIC] at BNL and for his leadership [in] preparing the detectors for RHIC."

Ludlam played a major role in the development of Brookhaven's world-class accelerator, RHIC, from its design stage starting in the early 1980s to the design and construction of its four detectors and the development of its research programs. RHIC began operations in 2000, colliding high-energy beams of heavy atomic nuclei, known as heavy ions, for experimental studies performed by physicists from around the world.

The heavy-ion collisions at RHIC allow the study of nature's strongest force, through the interactions of subatomic particles called quarks and gluons, by creating an extraordinarily hot and dense type of matter that is thought to have characterized the universe a few millionths of a second after the Big Bang. In 2005, physicists at RHIC found such a state of matter, and discovered that it behaves like a "perfect" liquid.

"The RHIC program has been - and continues to be - a wonderful adventure," Ludlam said. "I am grateful to have been a part of it from the beginning and honored to be recognized in this way by the AAAS."

Ludlam earned a Ph.D. in physics from Yale University in 1969 and began his career on the faculty of Yale. He joined Brookhaven in 1978 as an associate physicist and rose through the ranks to become a senior physicist in 1994. From 1990 to 1999, he served as associate project head for RHIC construction. In 2004, he became associate chair of nuclear physics within Brookhaven's Physics Department, and, in 2007, he was named chair of the Physics Department. Ludlam is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

One of ten national laboratories overseen and primarily funded by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Brookhaven National Laboratory conducts research in the physical, biomedical, and environmental sciences, as well as in energy technologies and national security. Brookhaven Lab also builds and operates major scientific facilities available to university, industry, and government researchers. Brookhaven is operated and managed for DOE's Office of Science by Brookhaven Science Associates, a limited-liability company founded by the Research Foundation of the State University of New York, for and on behalf of Stony Brook University, the largest academic user of Laboratory facilities; and Battelle Memorial Institute, a nonprofit, applied science and technology organization. Visit Brookhaven Lab's electronic newsroom for links, news archives, graphics, and more (http://www.bnl/gov/newsroom), or follow Brookhaven Lab on Twitter (http://twitter.com/BrookhavenLab).

Hurricane is being honored for his work in national security and nonproliferation at the National Nuclear Security Administration's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Hurricane is a program element leader dealing in thermonuclear secondary design in the Weapons and Complex Integration (WCI) directorate. Although much of his work is classified, he has led a multi-disciplinary team that worked on a difficult technical issue involving two vastly different areas of physics. "We were able to sort out the issues and form a solution," he said.

Lab director George Miller nominated Hurricane for the award, having dealt with the same effort years earlier.

"I personally worked on aspects of this problem as a weapons designer nearly 30 years ago and initiated technical efforts to resolve this anomaly when I was the thermonuclear design leader," Miller said. "For years, the search for a physics-based model has failed due to the complexity of the physics. As a weapons designer and the project leader for several U.S. stockpile systems in the 1980s, I am very aware of the tremendous technical challenge and difficulty associated with this anomaly."

"On behalf of the Laboratory, I want to congratulate Omar for his work and his dedication. This is truly an honor for him as well as our Lab," Miller added.

Further praise came from WCI Principal Associate Director Bruce Goodwin, who added, "Dr. Hurricane's efforts resulted in the development of a consistent, science-based understanding and implemented a physics-based predictive model to simulate warhead performance across a wide-range of stockpile regimes."

"I'm honored to be receiving this award from Steven Chu," said Hurricane, "not only because he is the Secretary of Energy, but also because he is a Nobel laureate."

Hurricane is quick to point out that many people contributed to the project over the past decade. The team not only needed to identify and understand the key physical processes involved, but then had to build computational tools to make predictions about the physics, and finally conduct experiments to validate their theories.

He compared the process to understanding gravity.

Realizing that gravity is what holds planets in their orbits is a step forward that directs your thinking, he explained. The second step is to build the mathematical models that predict how planets orbit the sun. Checking the mathematical models against observation is the final step. All three steps are important and are required to say that you've understood and solved the problem.

Hurricane, 41, came to LLNL 11 years ago from the University of California at Los Angeles.

His previous honors include an individual Defense Program Award of Excellence in 2004 from the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). As a member of the larger team for a specific program element, he shared an NNSA 2002 Defense Program Award of Excellence.

This latest award—named for the same physicist who co-founded Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory—comes with a citation signed by the Secretary of Energy, a gold medal bearing the likeness of Ernest Orlando Lawrence, and $50,000.

Founded in 1952, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (www.llnl.gov) is a national security laboratory that develops science and engineering technology and provides innovative solutions to our nation's most important challenges. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is managed by Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration.

Deborah Jin is a distinguished atomic physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an associate adjunct professor of physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a fellow of JILA, a joint institute of NIST and CU-Boulder. She is one of only a handful of women physicists who has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences and by far the youngest to have received that honor. Her technical innovations in the field of ultra cold Fermionic atom gases have led to discoveries that define this new area of physics research. Her research has been described as the crucial first step in developing superconductors that work at room temperature. The development of such superconductors could lead to faster computers, smaller cell phones and lower electric bills.

Jin earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and an A.B. from Princeton. In 2003, she received the prestigious John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship. Other honors include the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the American Physical Society's Maria Goeppert Mayer Award, the Samuel Wesley Stratton Award from NIST and the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics.

The Sigma Xi Scientific Research Society annually awards the prize to a scientist who has made a noteworthy contribution to scientific research as well as being someone who has demonstrated an ability to communicate the significance of this research to scientists in other disciplines.

Serving many roles during his career at Hitachi Ltd., Dr. Asai's contributions in electron device technology helped propel the company to a leading role in the semiconductor field, and he is credited with bringing many of the company's innovations to market. As a device physicist, he led a team of scientists to design and characterize sub-micron MOS devices considering adverse effects including the short-channel threshold voltage roll-off, hot-carrier injection, and alpha-particle-induced soft-errors. The 2-D numerical simulator for carrier transport, called CADDET, his team built for this purpose was a world benchmark during the 1970s. He helped build and commercialize electron beam mask-making and direct-writing technology, which has become an indispensable part of semiconductor manufacturing process. This technology has also been deployed for the critical dimension scanning electron microscope used to monitor and control the critical sizes of transistors during manufacturing.

Dr. Asai's direction at Hitachi also led to dynamic random access memories with 3-D memory cells and microcontrollers with embedded nonvolatile memories and digital signal processor capabilities. These are now key components in computers, cell phones and personal navigators. He also played a key role in the development of radio frequency identification (RF-ID) technology that features a very small chip size and non-duplicate ID numbers. It has the ability to trace industrial and commercial goods throughout the entire product lifecycle and now addresses the low-cost, tamper-resistance needs. He established an in-house venture company to form a partnership that cuts across all industry sectors to implement the RF-ID concept. The unique ID numbers are placed on the chip using electron-beam writing which he also worked on.

An IEEE Life Fellow, Dr. Asai received the IEEE Electron Devices Society Paul Rappaport Award in 1984, the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference Best Panel Award in 1990 and the IEEE Third Millennium Medal in 2000. He obtained his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees, all in applied physics, from the University of Tokyo, Japan. Dr. Asai is a Fellow of the IEEE and the Applied Physics Society of Japan. He worked for Hitachi from 1968 to 2006 and is currently executive vice president of Rigaku Corporation, Tokyo, Japan.

About IEEE
IEEE, the world's largest technical professional society, is commemorating its 125th anniversary in 2009 by Celebrating 125 Years of Engineering the Future around the globe. Through its more than 375,000 members in 160 countries, IEEE is a leading authority on a wide variety of areas ranging from aerospace systems, computers and telecommunications to biomedical engineering, electric power and consumer electronics. Dedicated to the advancement of technology, IEEE publishes 30 percent of the world's literature in the electrical and electronics engineering and computer science fields, and has developed nearly 900 active industry standards. The organization annually sponsors more than 900 conferences worldwide. Additional information about IEEE can be found at http://www.ieee.org.

Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy is chairman and professor at the department of physics at Quaid e Azam University, Islamabad, where he has taught for 36 years. He received a PhD in nuclear physics from MIT in 1978, and won the Abdus Salam Prize for Mathematics, the Baker Award for Electronics, and the UNESCO Kalinga Prize for the popularization of science.

It is his second award for his work on behalf of human rights of scientists. In 2006, he received the Heinz Pagels Award from the New York Academy of Sciences.

A grandson of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Professor Birman's involvement with repressed scientists began in the former Soviet Union when the government refused let to Jewish scientists emigrate. These scientists formed a group called the "refuseniks."

Professor Birman heard of their plight through the Committee of Concerned Scientists (CCS). Starting in 1974 he traveled to Moscow on "official business" as a co-organizer of a US-USSR Bi-national Symposium. During those visits he was able to get from his hotel to an apartment where refuseniks would meet for a weekly "Sunday Scientific Seminar in Moscow" to discuss their work.

At those encounters, Professor Birman developed a close kinship with the refuseniks and became determined to help them. "I recognized that had my grandparents not come to America 100 years earlier I could easily have been in their position instead," he explains.

Eventually, he made some 20 more trips to the former Soviet Union, conducting official business by day and meeting with dissidents by night. Because the scientists were not allowed to work or earn livelihoods, Professor Birman and other supporters would bring in electronic products that the scientists could sell on the black market to make enough money to eat. He made these trips knowing that the KGB, the Soviet Union's secret police, was watching him and could intercede at any time.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Professor Birman has supported persecuted scientists in several other countries. Currently, he is working to help Dr. Arash Alaei and Dr. Kumar Alaei, two brothers who are medical doctors who have been imprisoned by Iran for trying to treat AIDS patients in rural areas.

His goal has been to put "pressure, noise, and a spotlight" on governments who repress scientists. He actively writes letters to heads of governments and has traveled the world assisting those in need. He serves on the Board of CCS and as an Honorary Board Member of Human Rights in China (HRIC). In addition, he is a former chair and present member of other groups such as the APS Committee on International Freedom of Scientists (CIFS), APS Forum on International Physics and the American Association for the Advancement of Science Committee on Professional Responsibility.

Some of the scientists Professor Birman has helped in the past have become independent research scholars, such as Distinguished Professor of Physics Eugene Chudnovsky of Lehman College and Professor Emeritus Andrei Weissman of The College of Staten Island. He has joint projects underway with colleagues in England, Israel, Cuba, and China, and was the chair of the Ph.D. committee at Nankai University for Dr. Jin Shuo, who is now a physics professor in Beijing. In addition, the APS/People's Republic of China Cooperative Physics Program in AMO (atomic, molecular and optical) and Condensed Matter Physics, which Professor Birman directed for its first three years, has brought 60 senior Chinese physicists to major U.S. laboratories for two-year research visits.

Professor Birman has taught physics and conducted scholarly research, including mentoring around 35 Ph.D. students, at CCNY since 1974, when he joined the faculty after 12 years as a Professor of Physics at New York University. His research specialty is theoretical physics, especially group theory and symmetry in condensed matter, light scattering mechanisms, and superconductivity and nanophysics of hybrid excitons.

A cum laude graduate of CCNY, Class of 1947, he received a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1952, and was awarded the Docteur es Sciences, honoris causa, from the University de Rennes (France) in 1974. He has published more than 300 articles in refereed journals and written a monograph: "Theory of Crystal Space Groups and Lattice Dynamics."

To learn more about the Committee of Concerned Scientists and supporting human rights of repressed scientists, visit www.concernedscientists.org.