Physicists From UCSB And Harvard Are Selected To Receive Prestigious NSF Awards

Prestigious NSF Awards Author: NEERAJA SANKARAN This year, the National Science Foundation bestowed its two highest awards on physicists: The Alan T. Waterman Award has been given to Matthew P.A. Fisher, a professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and a research physicist at UCSB's Institute for Theoretical Physics; and the Vannevar Bush Award of the National Science Board (NSB) has been presented to Norman Ramsey, a Nobel laureate and Higgins Professor of Physics, emeritus, at Harvard University. Both researchers were honored last month at a dinner at the Department of State in Washington, D.C. NSF initiated the annual Waterman award in 1976 to recognize the outstanding achievements of a scientist under the age of 35. The winner of the $500,000 prize is selected by an NSF committee from a list of candidates nominated by their home institutions. NSB, the policy-making arm of NSF, gives the Bush award to recognize the lifetime achievements of a scientist. The prize consists of a bronze medal and a citation. The 34-year-old Fisher is only the fourth physicist to be honored with the Waterman prize. "Receiving the Waterman is a tremendous honor, and I hope it will further the cause of physics here on the UCSB campus," he comments. Fisher says he will funnel the prize money toward "scholarships for junior postdoctoral fellows at the Institute for Theoretical Physics." Fisher, who specializes in condensed-matter physics, has done fundamental research on high-temperature superconductors, a class of material that conducts electricity with no resistance, even at temperatures above absolute zero. "My work focuses mostly on low- temperature properties of matter, where quantum effects manifest themselves," he states. He is perhaps best known for his prediction of a new state of matter called the "vortex glass" state, which enables superconducting materials to retain their properties at higher temperatures. "The vortex glass phase was a phase I predicted would occur in impure high-temperature superconductors upon lowering the temperature. The magnetic vortex lines in the material 'freeze' into a glassy configuration, which restores the superconducting properties" of the material, he explains. Fisher's seminal paper, "Vortex glass superconductivity: a possible new phase in bulk high-Te-oxides" (Physical Review Letters, 62:1415, 1989), has been cited more than 500 times, according to the Science Citation Index of the Institute for Scientific Information, Philadelphia. After receiving a B.S. in engineering physics from Cornell University in 1981, Fisher obtained a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois in 1986. He then worked as a research physicist at the IBM T.J. Watson Laboratory in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., for seven years before moving to UCSB in 1993. Ramsey, 79, was recognized for his contributions to physics research and education, as well as public service. Studying such properties of matter as magnetic moments, he developed atomic precision spectroscopy, a technique to measure how various parts of atoms and molecules interact with each other. For this work, he received the 1989 Nobel Prize in physics. Nearly a dozen of his papers have been cited more than 100 times by other scientists. His most heavily referenced paper, drawing a total of more than 800 citations, is "Magnetic shielding of nuclei in molecules" (Physical Review, 78:699-703, 1950), featured as a "citation classic" in Current Contents (No. 18, April 30, 1984). "The primary reason that it became one of the most cited [papers] is that it provides the fundamental theoretical basis for all the later work on nuclear magnetic shielding and chemical shifts of nuclear magnetic resonance [NMR] that have made NMR such a powerful tool for analysis in chemistry, physics, and biology," suggests Ramsey. Ramsey completed two undergraduate degrees in the sciences, from Columbia University (1935) and Cambridge University in England (1937). He then received an M.A. from Cambridge, followed by a Ph.D. from Columbia in 1941. His diverse career has included government and defense-related assignments, in addition to teaching, administration, and research duties--first at Columbia from 1942 to 1947 and then at Harvard since 1947. He retired to emeritus status in 1986 Ramsey was a consultant to both the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development and the National Defense Research Committee during World War II. In 1946, he helped establish Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., and was the first chairman of the physics department there. Ramsey also led a 1982 panel that examined the ballistic acoustics related to President John F. Kennedy's assassination and 1989 investigations into cold fusion claims. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1952. (The Scientist, Vol:9, #13, pg.15, June 26, 1995) (Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)

Physicists From UCSB And Harvard Are Selected To Receive Prestigious NSF Awards

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