People

Paul Jennings, professor of civil engineering and applied mechanics at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, has been named vice president and provost of Caltech. An internationally known authority on earthquake engineering, Jennings has been chairman of Caltech's division of engineering and applied science since 1985. As vice president and provost, he will be responsible for all day-to-day academic affairs that relate to Caltech's teaching and research programs. Jennings, who has devoted his career to gathering and analyzing data on how past earthquakes have affected buildings, dams, and other structures, has recently been appointed by Cali-fornia's governor to be a member of an independent board of inquiry investigating the failure of the Nimitz Freeway and the Bay Bridge in the October earthquake. Jennings, past president of the Seismological Society of America and of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, received his B.S. in 1958 from Colorado State University, Fort Collins, and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Caltech in 1960 and 1963, respectively. He succeeds Barclay Kamb, who stepped down in order to devote more time to his geophysics research. The Houston Area Research Center (HARC) in The Woodslands, Texas, has selected Dimitri Nanopoulos to be its first research fellow through a program that allows researchers from HARC's collaborative institutions to participate in HARC activities. Nanopoulos, an astroparticle physicist, will head the astroparticle physics group of HARC's Texas Accelerator Center, whose research will support the Superconducting Supercollider and the international high-energy physics community. A professor of physics at Texas A&M University, College Station, Nanopoulos was one of the theorists who hypothesized in 1977 that all matter is divided into three families of fundamental matter - a theory that has since been confirmed experimentally at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN). Nanopoulos, who is also affiliated with Texas A&M's Center for Theoretical Physics, is currently working toward a fundamental theory that will unify the four forces of nature. Prior to coming to Texas, Nanopoulos worked at the Laboratoire de Physique Theorique de l'Ecole Normale Superieure in Cachan, France; the Lyman Laboratory of Physics at Harvard University; and CERN's theory division in Geneva, Switzerland. The FIDIA Research Foundation, headquartered in Washington, D.C., selected Per Andersen, chairman of the Institute of Neurophysiology at the University of Oslo, Norway, to give the 1989 Luigi Galvani Award Lecture. The lecture, which Andersen delivered in December at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., centered on synaptic integration in neurons of the hippocampus - a part of the nervous system to which he has dedicated his research efforts. Andersen and his group have described the trisynaptic circuit inside the hippocampus, including the actual sequence of cellular activation. He has participated in the finding of the lamellar organization of intrahippocampal connections, the equipotentiality of dendritic synapses, and the size of the hippocampal unitary EPSPs (excitatory postsynaptic potentials). Andersen is currently studying long-term potentiation, a phenomenon involved in learning and memory. Andersen, who is president of the European Neuroscience Association and a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science, received both his M.D. (1954) and his Ph.D. (1960) from the University of Oslo. The Luigi Galvani Award Lecture, one of four awarded by the FIDIA Research Foundation, is dedicated to the 18th-century Italian surgeon who discovered animal electricity through his experiments on the contraction of frog muscles. The Galvani Award Lecture recognizes excellence in research, which leads to an increased understanding in the neurosciences.

People

The Scientist Staff

Interested in reading more?

Become a Member of