1. AN AWARD GIVEN BY THE
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
THE 2009
ERNEST ORLANDO LAWRENCE AWARDS
D GIVEN BY THE
TMENT OF ENERGY
APRIL 28, 2010
NATIONAL ACADEMY
OF
SCIENCES BUILDING
2100 C STREET, N.W.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
4/12/2010 6:07:43 PM
2. The Honorable Steven Chu
Secretary of Energy
welcomes you to the presentation of the
2009 ERNEST ORLANDO LAWRENCE AWARD
to
Joan F. Brennecke
University of Notre Dame
William Dorland
University of Maryland
Omar Hurricane
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Wim Leemans
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Zhi-Xun Shen
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
and Stanford University
Sunney Xie
Harvard University
April 28, 2010
National Academy of Sciences Building
2100 C Street, N.W. Washington, D.C.
Reception immediately following the ceremony
WELCOME
3. JOAN F. BRENNECKE
University of Notre Dame
For her seminal work advancing fundamental
understanding in supercritical fluids and ionic liquids, and her
scientific and technological leadership in discovering new
environmentally-benign, green chemistries.
WILLIAM DORLAND
University of Maryland
For his scientific leadership in the development of
comprehensive computer simulations of plasma turbulence, and his
specific predictions, insights, and improved understanding of
turbulent transport in magnetically-confined plasma experiments.
OMAR HURRICANE
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
For his scientific leadership to advance understanding in a
long-standing nuclear weapons physics anomaly and his contribution
to nuclear weapons stockpile stewardship.
WIM LEEMANS
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
For his breakthrough work in developing the laser plasma wakefield
accelerator from concept to demonstration, and his scientific
leadership exploring its promise and unprecedented possibilities
ranging from hyperspectral light sources to high energy colliders.
ZHI-XUN SHEN
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
and Stanford University
For his ground breaking discoveries and pioneering use of high
resolution angle-resolved photoemission to advance understanding
of strongly correlated electron systems including high-transition
temperature superconductors and other complex oxides.
SUNNEY XIE
Harvard University
For his innovations in nonlinear Raman microscopy and highly
sensitive vibrational imaging, his scientific leadership in establishing
the field of single-molecule biophysical chemistry, and his seminal
work in enzyme dynamics and live cell gene expression.
2009 AWARD LAUREATE CITATIONS 2009 AWARD LAUREATE CITATIONS (CONTINUED)
4. Professor Joan Brennecke’s research has lead to seminal advances
in the understanding of solvation and reactions in supercritical and
ionic solvents. She has applied this new understanding of ionic liquids
and supercritical fluids to develop solvent systems suitable for
environmentally benign chemical processing, and thus has impacted
both industry and academia.
Ionic liquids are recently-identified classes of organic fluids that are
good solvents for a wide variety of industrially important chemical
reactions, and possess extremely small volatilities. The later property
means that evaporation, a major route for environmental contamination,
is absent for this new class of organic solvents. Dr. Brennecke’s
measurement and modeling of a wide range of ionic liquid physical
properties has helped underpin a science-based approach towards
establishing their use. Her phase equilibrium studies exploring the
feasibility of combining ionic liquids as solvents provided a scientific
basis for engineering scale processes involving ionic liquids. She has
also investigated the solution thermodynamics of water-ionic liquid
mixtures, including measurement of a number of their important
thermophysical properties. Via molecular simulation, she also
characterized important thermodynamic properties, including infinite
dilution activity coefficients of organic solutes in ionic liquids.
ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE
AND
TECHNOLOGY
JOAN BRENNECKE
UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME
5. Joan Brennecke has also conducted important research in supercritical
fluids. By using fluorescence spectroscopy, she provided early clear
experimental evidence of the very significant enhancement in solvent
density surrounding solute molecules immersed in a supercritical
medium. Moreover, she showed that asymmetry between local and bulk
conditions depend sensitively on the bulk density of the solvent, and
attain its maximum value at sub-critical densities. This work made a major
contribution to advance the understanding of solvation mechanisms at
supercritical conditions. In related work, Dr. Brennecke’s studies of
reactions in supercritical fluids using laser flash photolysis established
that diffusion-controlled processes are not affected by the very large
density asymmetry between local and bulk conditions in solute-solvent
and solute-solute distributions, which helps distinguish supercritical
mixtures of practical interest. This very important conclusion has
significantly shaped current understanding of rate processes in
supercritical solvents where her studies of esterification and hydrogen
abstraction reactions in supercritical solvents showed that for reaction-
controlled processes the rate can be dramatically affected by local
composition enhancements around the reactant.
Dr. Brennecke also developed a solvatochromic microstructure probe
based upon ultraviolet and visible spectroscopy that she applied to
directly test the widely-used Non-Random, Two-Liquid (NRTL) local
composition model for activity coefficients. Based upon this experimental
work, NRTL-predicted local composition solution models could be
microscopically tested and benchmarked for cases where chemical
complexation is absent. This result represents an important validated
case for engineering scale excess free energy models.
In her studies of reaction kinetics and solvation, Professor Brennecke
combined spectroscopic and photolytic investigations of supercritical
solvents with integral equation calculations of pair distribution functions in
model systems. Through the combination of measurements with
microscopic interpretation via integral equations, new insight was obtained
and used to systematically and predictably tailor solvent
characteristics in studies of pressure-dependent preferential solvation
in ternary systems. This approach is a significant benchmark to
establish the physicochemical and molecular-level fundamentals
underlying the behavior and properties of supercritical systems.
Joan F. Brennecke is the Keating-Crawford Professor of Chemical
Engineering at the University of Notre Dame and Director of the Notre
Dame Energy Center. She joined Notre Dame after completing her
Ph.D. and M.S. (1989 and 1987) degrees at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign and her B.S. at the University of Texas at Austin
Professor Brennecke has won significant awards for her work,
including the American Chemical Society’s Ipatieff Prize (2001), the
American Institute of Chemical Engineers’ Professional Progress Award
(2006), the J.M. Prausnitz Award in Applied Chemical Thermodynamics
(2007), the Julius Steiglitz Award, American Chemical Society Chicago
Section (2008), the University of Notre Dame Presidential Award (1998)
and the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award (1991).
She also was awarded Fellowships from the General Electric
Foundation (1989) and the National Science Foundation (1985) and
received the University of Illinois Departmental DuPont Fellowship
(1985) and the DuPont Fellowship (1984) as well as the College of
Engineering Outstanding Scholar/Leadership Award, University of
Texas (1985).
6. Professor Bill Dorland has pioneered the development of computational
models that have significantly advanced the predictive scientific
understanding of important topics in fusion science. Harnessing the
power of nuclear fusion -- the power source of stars and hydrogen bombs
-- in a form capable of providing steady, controllable electrical power, has
long been a holy grail of clean energy research. The work of Dr. Dorland
signaled a turning point in the field, where turbulence modeling for the
first time is taken as a serious predictor of the confinement properties
of fusion plasmas. Moreover, he made his codes widely available to the
community, and supported its users.
To understand tokamak turbulent transport, Dr. Dorland focused on the
turbulence driven by the gradient in ion temperature in the core of toroidal
plasma, which is believed to act as the dominant driver in many tokamak
experiments. This is a very challenging problem because both electrons
and ions must be modeled under turbulent conditions, which requires
deep insight on how the consequent time and spatial scale problems are
to be properly addressed from first principles. Professor Dorland
rigorously addressed this multi-scale problem by developing a 3-D
“gyrofluid” code that has led to a number of discoveries underpinning the
origins of the turbulence itself. One of his primary discoveries was that a
separate thermodynamic accounting of the electrons and ions must be
used, indicating that the temperature gradients of both components
NUCLEAR TECHNOLOGIES
(FISSION AND FUSION)
WILLIAM DORLAND
UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND
7. have independent influence, and can drive turbulent fluctuations at
rather different spatial scales. His combination of 3-D nonlinear “gyrofluid”
simulations of turbulence with a full kinetic model for the onset threshold
for the instability was revolutionary in light of the widespread failure of
earlier modeling efforts. In his detailed theory-based model, which
contained no adjustable parameters, he was able to accurately reproduce
both the ion temperature profiles and the overall energy confinement time
of a variety of discharges in the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) at
the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). Most striking was that
the theoretical model (denoted as the IFS-PPPL model) was in better
agreement with the TFTR experimental data than were empirical models
based on international databases.
This remarkable result made a transformative change to the field, and
as a result, advanced modeling of turbulence in tokamaks is now an
accepted critical tool used to understand and predict the performance of
fusion experiments. Consequently, his work had an immediate impact on
the planning for ITER.
With broad recognition of the potential of turbulence simulations, a new
class of nonlinear, kinetic simulation codes was developed, with
Dr. Dorland playing a leadership role. He and his colleagues were the first
to develop an electromagnetic “gyrokinetic” simulation code to study the
low frequency turbulence that drives energy and particle transport in high
temperature magnetized plasmas. Dorland’s “gs2” code is now one of the
key tools of nonlinear plasma physics. It has been used to analyze data
from all of the major tokamak experiments in the world, and has a large
international group of users, which has since spread into the astrophysics
community. With this powerful tool Dr. Dorland was the first to make the
observation that the electron temperature gradient could drive turbulence
and compete with that driven by the corresponding ion temperature
gradient. This key result provides the basis for an explanation of the large
electron heat transport measured in some experiments. Such transport
had come as a surprise, since this class of turbulence is driven at much
smaller spatial scales and, as a result, its impact on transport had been
assumed to be negligible. Dr. Dorland and his colleagues, however,
showed that this turbulence formed elongated streams that carried
energy across the magnetic field much more efficiently than other forms
of turbulence, offering a physics basis for this behavior.
Dr. Dorland received a B.S. in Physics (1988) from the University of
Texas at Austin, an M.P.A. in Public and International Affairs (1993)
and Ph.D. in Astrophysical Sciences (1993) from Princeton University.
He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas (September
1993-February 1996).
Dr. Dorland is a Visiting Reader at Imperial College, London, a
Wolfgang Pauli Fellow at the University of Vienna, and serves as the
Director of the Center for Multiscale Plasma Dynamics, a DOE Fusion
Science Center hosted jointly by the University of Maryland and UCLA.
He was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2005.
8. Dr. Omar Hurricane’s research focuses on the development of physics-
based models to advance scientific understanding of an energy balance
anomaly critical to Stockpile Stewardship. This issue is one of the major
unresolved technical challenges facing the nuclear weapons community
since underground testing ceased, and is a major source of uncertainty
in the required annual certification of the stockpile’s safety and reliability.
Dr. Hurricane is leading an effort to implement a physics-based model
in advanced computer codes at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
that will provide a new assessment basis for stockpile systems.
Dr. Hurricane increased the ability to identify and understand the key
physical processes involved in this challenge, designed and built
computational tools to make predictions about the physics, and finally
conducted experiments to validate the theories. This is a significant
breakthrough and is at the heart of the science-based Stockpile
Stewardship Program.
Physics-based models are particularly valuable, because they provide
consistent, science-based understanding, which when validated through
experiments, can simulate warhead performance across a wide range of
stockpile regimes and thus eliminate the need to develop and use
NATIONAL SECURITY
AND
NON-PROLIFERATION
OMAR HURRICANE
LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY
9. different empirical approximations specifically calibrated for each
weapons system. 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 that 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.
Dr. Hurricane is one of the principal investigators on the design and
development of experiments at the University of Rochester to observe the
dynamic evolution of Kelvin Helmholtz instabilities. This new experimental
platform provides access to the high-energy-density regimes required to
explore another important nuclear explosive anomaly.
Dr. Hurricane received a in B.S. Physics and Applied Mathematics from
Metropolitan State College Denver (1990, Summa Cum Laude), an M.S.
in Physics (1992) and Ph.D. in Physics (1994) from UCLA, where he was
a Postdoctoral Fellow (September 1994 until September 1998).
Dr. Hurricane was awarded the U.S. Department of Energy 2004
Recognition of Excellence Award in Weapons Design (2005), the
U.S. Department of Energy 2002 Recognition of Excellence Award in
Weapons Science (2004), the High Velocity Impact Society “Best Paper
Award” (2003), the Outstanding Student Paper Award, American
Geophysical Union, Space Physics (1992), and Fellowships from the
United States Department of Energy Magnetic Fusion Science
(1991-94) and the University of California, Irvine (1990-91).
10. Dr. Wim Leemans is recognized as a leader in laser plasma acceleration,
and since such techniques offer a new way to build high performance
particle accelerators of much smaller size than conventional devices, this
innovation holds great promise. The impact of Dr. Leemans’ work is both
in laser plasma physics, as well as in the advancement and innovation
of novel accelerators. The latter especially holds promise to profoundly
impact the experimental and implementation landscape in broad areas
ranging from advanced probes of materials in physics, chemistry and
biology, to applications in medicine and energy.
His experimental laser plasma acceleration devices show accelerating
gradients several orders of magnitude better than current particle
accelerators, having demonstrated electron acceleration to 1 GeV over
3.3 cm, whereas, more conventional accelerators require 64 m to reach
the same energy. In such laser wakefield accelerator experiments, a
laser pulse is sent through a plasma to create a plasma wave "wake," in
which bunches of free electrons are trapped and ride along. Eventually
the trapped electrons outrun the wake, which limits how far they can be
accelerated and thus limits their energy. Leemans’ breakthrough was to
lengthen the acceleration through lowering the plasma density and
thereby increasing the wake speed. Once fully developed, this new
technology could replace many of the traditional RF accelerators,
including many found in hospitals and research facilities.
WIM LEEMANS
LAWRENCE BERKELEY NATIONAL LABORATORY
HIGH ENERGY
AND
NUCLEAR PHYSICS
11. Dr. Leemans’ pioneering technical achievements have also been put into
practice. Through his Berkeley Lab Laser Acceleration (BELLA) project,
he is providing international leadership and is inspiring world-wide
research activities on capillary discharge based laser plasma
accelerators. In this project, he has experimentally demonstrated the
possibility of guiding laser beams of relativistic intensity in preformed
plasma channels and the production of monoenergetic beams using a
laser wakefield accelerator. This achievement was chosen as one of
the top ten discoveries in 2004 by the journal Nature, and has received
worldwide recognition.
Other highlighted work that Dr. Leemans is leading includes a
demonstration of a new method of generating 300 femtosecond long
pulses of hard x-rays (30 keV) by scattering a terawatt laser pulse off a
relativistic electron beam at 90°. This method has already provided a new
tool for probing the structural dynamics of materials, where it has been
used to study laser-induced ultrafast melting in semiconductors.
Dr. Leemans has also provided scientific leadership in his theoretical
work in which he proposes a method to produce femtosecond bunches
in a plasma based laser driven accelerator. This method relies on the use
of three collinear laser pulses in plasma, where an intense laser pulse
drives a large plasma wake and two counter-propagating injection pulses.
Dr. Leemans received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering/Applied Physics,
Vrije Universiteit Brussels, Belgium (1985); an M.S. in Electrical
Engineering from UCLA (1987) and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering with
emphasis on plasma physics from UCLA (1991).
Wim Leemans is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (2001) and
the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (2007). His work
has been recognized by the APS with the 1992 Simon Ramo Award, by
the IEEE with the 1996 Klaus Halbach Award and by the US Particle
Accelerator School with the 2005 Prize for Achievement in Accelerator
Physics and Technology.
12. During the last decade, Professor Z-X Shen has pioneered the use of
high-resolution, angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES).
Through his leadership, ARPES has become a powerful tool for studying
the electronic structure of high-temperature superconductors. His
innovative applications of ARPES have led to a series of important
discoveries within the field of strongly correlated electron systems, and
have advanced the understanding of complex oxide and high transition
temperature superconductors. In particular, Dr. Shen used ARPES to
show that the superconducting gap has “d-wave” anisotropy in momentum
space, and to demonstrate that electronic excitations are gapped even in
the normal state of the high-transition temperature superconductors. The
latter is now termed a “pseudogap,” which is a gap-like feature appearing
in the non-superconducting state of cuprate materials when the charge
carrier density is low. Moreover, he provided deep insights on the
relationship between these two gaps, including evidence of collective
mode coupling. His work provides an important foundation to inspire and
lead the effort to achieve a predictive understanding of superconductivity
and related phenomena.
Dr. Shen’s research has focused on strongly correlated materials
made from transition metal oxides. These materials have unique
properties, such as high temperature superconductivity and colossal
magnetoresistance, which are not describable in terms of the behavior
of individual electrons.
MATERIALS RESEARCH ZHI-XUN SHEN
SLAC NATIONAL ACCELERATOR LABORATORY
AND
STANFORD UNIVERSITY
13. Shen made a major breakthrough when he showed that studying these
materials under synchrotron X-ray light could begin to reveal the
important and unexpected underlying physics and symmetry behind
superconductivity, which has widespread applications in power
transmission technology, accelerator technology, medical imaging
devices and microwave technology. Shen has contributed greatly to a
general understanding of the physics of these materials. He has
published more than 250 papers in his career thus far, several of which
are considered seminal in the field. He has also trained many young
researchers, including more than twenty who are now on the faculties
and staff of research universities and national laboratories.
Professor Shen’s work to improve the experimental resolution of ARPES
allowed measurement of small changes in the gap magnitude as a
function of doping and temperature, revealing a subtle interplay
between the superconducting gap and the pseudogap. This complex
behavior suggests a competition between the two; however, because
the energy scales merge near optimal doping, it also suggests that the
two phenomena are interrelated. In conventional superconductors,
phonon mediated interactions attract the electrons and form Cooper
pairs required for Bose condensation and zero resistance, while in
high-Tc superconductors, the boson mediates the pairing, and this
“mechanism” for the latter case has been long-debated. Using ARPES,
Professor Shen discovered that the electrons are strongly coupled to a
bosonic mode and exhibit a kink in their dispersion spectra. This
anisotropy, which follows that of the d-wave gap, strongly suggests an
intimate connection to the superconductivity. Moreover, by combining
this discovery with other spectroscopies that measure the phonons
directly, he identified the bosonic mode as a phonon, with one in
particular that couples anisotropically to the Fermi surface. This
anisotropic electron-phonon interaction provided a key ingredient for
understanding high-Tc superconductivity.
Professor Shen has also brought new dimensions to photoemission
techniques, such as time-resolved angle-resolved photoemission
spectroscopy (trARPES), which he applied to novel quantum systems to
directly probe the effects of collective excitations and collective vibrations.
In his trARPES studies of charge density wave (CDW) compounds, he
was able to directly observe the ultra-fast oscillatory behavior of the
electronic and atomic structure as the system equilibrated following
transient melting of the CDW. This melting initiated a time-dependent
closing of the electronic CDW gap in the electronic band structure, where
it was found that due to electron-phonon coupling, two collective modes
coherently modulate the electronic band structure. The observed
collective vibrations are intimately connected to the CDW physics. This
is the first time that momentum-dependent dynamics were recorded with
this technique, and it represents a major breakthrough in uncovering the
mechanics of collective phenomena in solid state physics.
Professor Shen also discovered novel properties of diamondoids, which
are nanoscale clusters of diamonds that give rise to new ideas and
concepts for energy technologies, such as novel lighting and thermosolar
devices. Most recently, he confirmed the existence of topological
insulators, which allow electrons on its surface to travel with no loss of
energy at room temperatures, and can be fabricated using existing
semiconductor technologies. Such materials are not conventional
superconductors, and can only carry small currents, but could greatly
increase microchip speeds and efficiencies. They may also significantly
advance spintronic devices for the next generation electronics.
Dr. Shen received a B.S. from Fudan University (1983), an M.S. from
Rutgers University (1985), and a Ph.D. from Stanford University (1989).
His honors include being named a Fellow by Sloan Research (1993) and
the American Physical Society (2002); and being awarded a NSF Young
Investigator Award (1993), Outstanding Young Researcher Award, Office
of Basic Energy Science, Department of Energy (1994); Materials Science
Research Award for Outstanding Scientific Accomplishment in SSP, DOE
(1994), the Kammerlingh Onnes Prize (2000) and the Takeda Foundation
Technical Entrepreneurship Award (2002)
14. Professor Sunney Xie is a pioneer in the development of experimental
tools at the frontier of molecular spectroscopy and optical microscopy,
and a leader in utilizing these tools in a wide range of scientific topics
including biophysical chemistry, biophysics, medicine, enzymology,and
genomics. Professor Xie’s contributions include seminal advances in
the theoretical understanding of imaging contrast mechanisms, the
development of advanced laser technology, improving imaging
sensitivity by orders of magnitude, and demonstrating important
applications in biomedicine. His discovery and contribution in
single-molecule biophysical chemistry and live cell bio-imaging has
made broad impact to understanding the cell, and life, at the molecular
level. He was among the first to study single-molecule behavior by
fluorescence detection at room temperature, and this work helped
initiate the field of single-molecule science.
Professor Xie’s scientific discoveries are impressively numerous, and
include real time observation of enzymatic turnovers of a single enzyme
molecule by fluorescence detection, revealing the general phenomenon
of significant fluctuations in the enzymatic rate; development of a new
approach to probe conformational dynamics within a protein molecule
through photo-induced electron transfer to make the first direct
observation that conformation fluctuation occurs within a single molecule
over a broad range of time scales; discovering that the electron transfer
CHEMISTRY SUNNEY XIE
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
15. approach is complementary to the fluorescence resonant energy
transfer approaches as it allows smaller distance changes on the
angstrom scale to be measured; demonstrating that conformational
fluctuation in an intact protein responsible for the enzymatic rate
fluctuation, and proving that the fluctuating enzyme obeys the
classic Michaelis-Menten equation in biochemistry; developing and
implementing a multiplexed single-molecule assay to study
DNA-protein interactions in a variety of systems, including digestion
of DNA by exonuclease, DNA synthesis by the replisome, DNA repair
enzyme searching DNA and replication fidelity of DNA polymerase;
pioneering efforts in single-molecule enzymology, with possibilities to
sequence the human genome by single-molecule techniques;
studying gene expression in living cells reporting simultaneously two
different approaches to monitor stochastic gene expression in a living
cell with single protein sensitivity making it possible to probe
single-protein molecules as they are generated, one at a time, in a
living cell, and to describe in a quantitative way the transcription and
translation processes; recording images of single fluorophores in a
live cell and using them to probe a variety of fundamental processes
in living cells, including transcription, translation, replication, gene
regulation and DNA repair, and in particular, binding and
unbinding kinetics of a single transcription factor on a specific DNA
site in a live E. coli cell, where such studies yield rich and unprec-
edented information about DNA protein interactions in a living cell
offering the possibility for probing gene regulation in bacteria; discov-
ering that a single-molecule event of the complete dissociation of a
tetrameric repressor from DNA is solely responsible for the switching
of an E. coli cell’s phenotype yielding a clear experimental demonstra-
tion that a single molecule action makes a life changing decision in a
living cell; and demonstrating three dimensional imaging of living cells
using coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering (CARS) microscopy,
which has since become a field of its own.
Dr. Xie was born in Beijing, China. He received a B.S. in Chemistry
from Peking University, Beijing, P. R. China in 1984 and a Ph.D. in
Chemistry from the University of California at San Diego in 1990.
Xie is the Mallinckrodt Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology
at Harvard University, is considered to be a founding father of
single-molecule enzymology, and has made major contributions to
biomedical imaging by developing CARS microscopy. His honors
include the Berthold Leibinger Zukunftspreis for Laser Technology,
Germany (2008), the Willis E. Lamb Award for Laser Science and
Quantum Optics (2007), the National Institutes of Health Director’s
Pioneer Award (2004), the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in the
Physical Sciences, Israel (2003), the Coblentz Award, Coblentz Society
(1996) and the Jane Hart Memorial Award, University of California at
San Diego (1988).
He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science and the Biophysical Society, and was elected into the
American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
16. THE LIFE OF ERNEST ORLANDO LAWRENCE
Ernest Orlando Lawrence’s scientific accomplishments and influence
onscience are unique in his generation and rank among the most
outstanding in history. His cyclotron was to nuclear science what
Galileo’s telescope was to astronomy. A foremost symbol of the rise
of indigenous American science in the twentieth century, Lawrence,
perhaps more than any other man, brought engineering to the
laboratory, to the great benefit of scientific progress. He originated a
new pattern of research, of the group type and on the grand scale,
which has been emulated the world over. Rarely, if ever, has any person
given so many others, in such a small span of years, the opportunity
to make careers for themselves in science. Lawrence was a leader in
bringing the daring of science to technology, in wedding science to the
general welfare, and in integrating science into national policy.
Lawrence was born in Canton, South Dakota, on August 8, 1901,
the son of educated Norwegian immigrants. He received his B.S.
degree from the University of South Dakota and his M.A. in physics
from the University of Minnesota. He continued his studies at the
University of Chicago for two years, then transferred to Yale, where he
received his Ph.D. in 1925. In 1928, Lawrence went to the University of
California as an associate professor, and in 1930, at the age of 29, he
became the youngest full professor on the Berkeley faculty.
17. In July 1958, Lawrence traveled to Geneva to take part in developing
an agreement on means for detecting nuclear weapon tests. In the
midst of negotiations, he became ill and was forced to return to Palo
Alto,California, where he died on August 27, 1958.
Lawrence received many awards during his lifetime, including the
1939 Nobel Prize in Physics, the Hughes Medal of the Royal Society,
the Medal for Merit, the Faraday Medal, the American Cancer Society
Medal, the very first Enrico Fermi Award, and the first Sylvanus Thayer
Award. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and
the American Philosophical Society and recipient of many honorary
degrees and memberships in foreign societies.
His doctoral thesis was in photoelectricity. Later, he made the most
precise determination to that time of the ionization potential of the
mercury atom. With J.W. Beams, he devised a method of obtaining
time intervals as small as three billionths of a second, and he applied
this technique to study the early stages of electric spark discharge.
He originated a new and more precise method for measuring e/m,
which was perfected by F.G. Dunnington.
In 1929, Lawrence, who for some time had been contemplating the
problem of accelerating ions chanced while scanning the literature,
upon a sketch in a German publication. He formulated, within minutes,
the principles of the cyclotron and the linear accelerator and so set
himself upon a course that was to fundamentally influence scientific
research and human events. Between the brilliant, simple concept
and operating machines lay engineering barriers not previously
encountered.Lawrence’s willingness to tackle new engineering
problems and his success in solving them, as he reached for
successively new energy ranges, was a departure in scientific
research that is an important part of his contribution. The hard road
he chose was recognized when W.D. Coolidge, presenting Lawrence
with the National Academy of Sciences’ valued Comstock Prize in
1937, said, “Dr. Lawrence envisioned a radically different course ...
[which] called for boldness and faith and persistence to a degree rarely
matched.” By 1936, the scale of research and supporting engineering
development was so large that the Radiation Laboratory was created
at the University of California. The prototype of the big laboratory had
been born.
Lawrence championed interdisciplinary collaboration: he strongly
encouraged physicists to work with biologists, and he set up his own
radioisotope distribution system, supplying isotopes to hundreds of
doctors and numerous institutions in the prewar period. With his brother
John, director of the University’s medical center, he used the cyclotron
to irradiate malignant tissues with neutrons.
This biography was excerpted from “E. 0. Lawrence: Physicist, Engineer, Statesman of
Science,” by Glenn T. Seaborg, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers,
Inc., Nuclear and Plasma Science, 5 Society News, June 1992.
18. The Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award was established in 1959 in honor
of a scientist who helped elevate American physics to world leadership.
E. O. Lawrence was the inventor of the cyclotron, an accelerator of
subatomic particles, and a 1939 Nobel Laureate in physics for that
achievement. The Radiation Laboratory he developed at Berkeley
during the 1930s ushered in the era of “big science,” in which
experiments were no longer done by an individual researcher and a
few assistants on the table-top of an academic lab but by large,
multidisciplinary teams of scientists and engineers in entire buildings
full of sophisticated equipment and huge scientific machines. During
World War II, Lawrence and his accelerators contributed to the
Manhattan Project, and he later played a leading role in establishing
the U.S. system of national laboratories, two of which (Lawrence
Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore) now bear his name.
Shortly after Lawrence’s death in August 1958, John A. McCone,
Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, wrote to President
Eisenhower suggesting the establishment of a memorial award in
Lawrence’s name. President Eisenhower agreed, saying, “Such an
award would seem to me to be most fitting, both as a recognition of
what he has given to our country and to mankind, and as a means of
helping to carry forward his work through inspiring others to dedicate
their lives and talents to scientific effort.” The first Lawrence Awards
were given in 1960.
The Lawrence Award honors scientists and engineers at mid-career
(defined as within 20 years of receiving a Ph.D.), showing promise for
the future, for exceptional contributions in research and development
supporting the Department of Energy and its mission to advance the
national, economic, and energy security of the United States.
The 2009 Lawrence Award is given in the following categories:
Chemistry, Materials Research, Environmental Science and
Technology, Nuclear Technologies (Fission and Fusion), National
Security and Non-Proliferation, and High Energy and Nuclear Physics.
The Lawrence Awards are administered by the Department of Energy’s
Office of Science.
Each Lawrence Award category awardee receives a citation signed by
the Secretary of Energy, a gold medal bearing the likeness of Ernest
Orlando Lawrence, and $50,000; if there are co-winners in a category,
the honorarium is shared equally.
THE ERNEST ORLANDO LAWRENCE AWARD
19. 1996: Charles Roger Alcock
Mina J. Bissell
Thom H. Dunning, Jr.
Charles V. Jakowatz, Jr.
Sunil K. Sinha
Theofanis G. Theofanous
Jorge Luis Valdes
1994: John D. Boice, Jr.
E. Michael Campbell
Gregory J. Kubas
Edward William Larsen
John D. Lindl
Gerard M. Ludtka
George F. Smoot
John E. Till
1993: James G. Anderson
Robert G. Bergman
Alan R. Bishop
Yoon I. Chang
Robert K. Moyzis
John W. Shaner
Carl Wieman
1991: Zachary Fisk
Richard Fortner
Rulon Linford
Peter Schultz
Richard E. Smalley
J. Pace Vandevender
2006: A. Paul Alivisatos
Malcolm J. Andrews
Moungi G. Bawendi
Arup K. Chakraborty
My Hang V. Huynh
Marc Kamionkowski
John M. Zachara
Steven John Zinkle
2004: Nathaniel J. Fisch
Bette Korber
Claire E. Max
Fred N. Mortensen
Richard J. Saykally
Ivan K. Schuller
Gregory W. Swift
2002: C. Jeffrey Brinker
Claire M. Fraser
Bruce T. Goodwin
Keith O. Hodgson
Saul Perlmutter
Benjamin D. Santer
Paul J. Turinsky
1998: Dan Gabriel Cacuci
Joanna S. Fowler
Laura H. Greene
Steven E: Koonin
Mark H. Thiemens
Ahmed H. Zewail
THE
ERNEST ORLANDO LAWRENCE AWARD LAUREATES
20. 1990: John J. Dorning
James R. Norris
S. Thomas Picraux
Wayne J. Shotts
Maury Tigner
F. Ward Whicker
1988: Mary K. Gaillard
Richard T. Lahey, Jr.
Chain Tsuan Liu
Gene H. McCall
Alexander Pines
Joseph S. Wall
1987: James W. Gordon
Miklos Gyulassy
Sung-Hou Kim
James L. Kinsey
J. Robert Merriman
David E. Moncton
1986: James J. Duderstadt
Helen T. Edwards
Joe W. Gray
C. Bradley Moore
Gustavus J. Simmons
James L. Smith
1985: Anthony P. Malinauskas
William H. Miller
David R. Nygren
Gordon C. Osbourn
Betsy Sutherland
Thomas A. Weaver
1984: Robert W. Conn
John J. Dunn
Peter L. Hagelstein
Siegfried S. Hecker
Robert B. Laughlin
Kenneth N. Raymond
1983: James F. Jackson
Michael E. Phelps
Paul H. Rutherford
Mark S. Wrighton
George B. Zimmerman
1964: Jacob Bigeleisen
Albert L. Latter
Harvey M. Pratt
Marshall N. Rosenbuth
Theos J. Thompson
1963: Herbert J.C. Kouts
L. James Rainwater
Louis Rosen
James M. Taub
Cornelius A. Tobias
1962: Andrew A. Benson
Richard P. Feynman
Herbert Goldstein
Anthony L. Turkevich
Herbert F. York
1961: Leo Brewer
Henry Hurwitz, Jr.
Conrad L. Longmire
Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky
Kenneth E. Wilzbach
1960: Harvey Brooks
John S. Foster, Jr.
Isadore Perlman
Norman F. Ramsey, Jr.
Alvin M. Weinberg
1982: George F. Chapline, Jr.
Mitchell J. Feigenbaum
Michael J. Lineberry
Nicholas Turro
Raymond E. Wildung
1981: Martin Blume
Yuan Tseh Lee
Fred R. Mynatt
Paul B. Selby
Lowell L. Wood
1980: Donald W. Barr
B. Grant Logan
Nicholas P. Samios
Benno P. Schoenborn
Charles D. Scott
1977: James D. Bjorken
John L. Emmett
F. William Studier
Gareth Thomas
Dean A. Waters
1976: A. Philip Bray
James W. Cronin
Kaye D. Lathrop
Adolphus L. Lotts
Edwin D. McClanahan
1975: Evan H. Appelman
Charles E. Elderkin
William A. Lokke
Burton Richter
Samuel C. Ting
1974: Joseph Cerny
Harold Paul Fourth
Henry C. Honeck
Charles A. McDonald
Chester R.Richmond
1973: Louis Baker
Seymour Sack
Thomas E. Wainwright
James Robert Weir
Sheldon Wolff
1972: Charles C. Cremer
Sidney D. Drell
Marvin Goldman
David A. Shirley
Paul F. Zweifel
1971: Thomas B. Cook
Robert L. Fleischer
Robert L. Hellens
P. Buford Price
Robert M. Walker
1970: William J. Bair
James W. Cobble
Joseph M. Hendrie
Michael M. May
Andrew M. Sessler
1969: Geoffrey F. Chew
Don T. Cromer
Ely M. Gelbard
F. Newton Hayes
John H. Nuckolls
1968: James R. Arnold
E. Richard Cohen
Val L. Fitch
Richard Latter
John B. Storer
1967: Mortimer M. Elkind
John M. Googin
Allen F. Henry
John O. Rasmussen
Robert N. Thorn
1966: Harold M. Agnew
Ernest C. Anderson
Murray Gell-Mann
John R. Huizenga
Paul R. Vanstrum
1965: George A. Cowan
Floyd M. Culler
Milton C. Edlund
Theodore B. Taylor
Arthur C. Upton
