astrophysics
- Ronald W.P. Drever
Ronald W.P. Drever
Read full bioBorn in Renfrewshire, Scotland, Ronald Drever studied at Glasgow University and gained his PhD there in 1958. At Glasgow he looked for gravitational waves first by monitoring the vibrations of aluminium bar detectors and then by setting up a 10-metre interferometer. In 1979 he was hired by the California Institute of Technology to lead a new programme in experimental gravitation, which led to the construction of a 40-metre device that tested many of the techniques employed in LIGO. Drever has carried out experiments in a number of areas of physics, including spectroscopic measurements to look for anisotropy of mass and space - his null results providing accurate confirmations of both special and general relativity. However, it is in the study of gravitational radiation that he has left his biggest mark. Among his many innovations is a technique for improving the stability of laser frequencies. Drever has been awarded the Einstein Prize, the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics and the Gruber Prize in Cosmology. He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and ... - Kip S. Thorne
Kip S. Thorne
Read full bioKip Thorne was born in Utah and studied physics at the California Institute of Technology. After obtaining his PhD from Princeton University in 1965 and carrying out two years of postdoctoral study, he returned to Caltech and has worked there ever since. Thorne has carried out a wide range of theoretical research in gravitation and astrophysics, including having predicted the existence of a type of red supergiant star with a neutron star core, and using general relativity to describe how black holes move and precess. His work has also provided the theoretical underpinnings for LIGO; he and his colleagues have established target sources of gravitational waves and carried out numerical simulations of the kind that allowed the September 2015 signal to be identified as a pair of merging black holes. In addition to awards recognising his work as a writer and a science advisor to the film Interstellar, Thorne has won the Lilienfeld Prize, the Niels Bohr Gold Medal, the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics and the Gruber Prize in Cosmology, among others. He ... - Rainer Weiss
Rainer Weiss
Read full bioBorn in Berlin, Rainer Weiss obtained his first degree and then in 1962 his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After serving as an assistant professor of physics at Tufts University and then a research associate at Princeton University, he returned to MIT and has been there ever since. Weiss has contributed to a variety of scientific fields, including atomic physics, laser physics and astronomy. As part of the latter, he measured the spectrum of the very faint but ubiquitous radiation known as the cosmic microwave background, and was one of the founders of NASA’s COBE cosmic microwave mission. He co-founded LIGO with Thorne and later Drever, having laid the foundations for the project in 1972 with a paper detailing how an interferometer could distinguish gravitational waves from background noise. He has continued to contribute to nearly all elements of the experiment since then. Weiss has been awarded the Einstein Prize and the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, and has twice won the Gruber Prize in Cosmology. He is a member of the ...
nanoscience
- Gerd Binnig
Gerd Binnig
Read full bioGerd Binnig is a German physicist and Nobel Laureate. He studied at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, where in 1978 he obtained his PhD for work on superconductivity with Hans Eckhardt Hoenig, in the group of Werner Martienssen. Immediately after his PhD he moved to Zürich, where he became a research staff member at IBM. In collaboration with Heinrich Rohrer and other colleagues including Christoph Gerber and Edmund Weibel, in 1981 he developed the scanning tunnelling microscope. In recognition of this work, Binnig and Rohrer were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986. Between 1985 and 1988, Binnig was based in California, working at IBM in Almaden and at Stanford University, where he had a visiting professorship. It was during this period that he involved his IBM colleague Christoph Gerber and Stanford Professor Calvin Quate in realizing his idea of the atomic force microscope. When he returned to Europe he was awarded an honorary professorship at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, where he directed an IBM laboratory until 1995. In 1994 ... - Christoph Gerber
Christoph Gerber
Read full bioChristoph Gerber is a Swiss professor of physics and Director for Scientific Communication of the National Center of Competence for Nanoscale Science at the University of Basel, where he has been since 2004. After his PhD, Gerber moved to Sweden and in 1964 became group leader in research and development for the company Contraves. In 1966 he moved to IBM Research in Zürich, with which he remained associated until 2004; in the 1980s he also worked temporarily at IBM Almaden and at the IBM physics group in Munich. In the early 1980s he worked with Gerd Binnig, Heinrich Rohrer and Edmund Weibel on the development of the scanning tunnelling microscope. He then continued his collaboration with Binnig, and while at IBM Almaden the two scientists, in collaboration with Calvin Quate from Stanford University, realized the atomic force microscope. In the last 30 years he has continued to explore the possibility of using scanning probes as imaging, manipulation and diagnostic tools. He is particularly interested in developing biochemical sensors based on atomic force microscopy. He has ... - Calvin Quate
Calvin Quate
Read full bioCalvin Quate is an American engineer and physicist who holds the Leland T. Edwards Professorship in the School of Engineering at Stanford. He graduated in electrical engineering at the University of Utah in 1944, and then moved to Stanford to work on his PhD, which he obtained in 1950. Between 1950 and 1960 he worked at different research laboratories, first at Bell Labs in Murray Hills, New Jersey, then at Sandia in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He finally moved to Stanford University, where since 1961 he has been a professor of applied physics and electrical engineering. Quate has been interested in scanning probes for a long time. In the early 1970s, working with Ross Lemons, he developed the scanning acoustic microscope, which was reported in a paper in Applied Physics Letters in 1974; this instrument can be employed to investigate the structural properties of devices, as well as the elasticity of tissues. In the mid-1980s he became interested in realizing an instrument that could provide images of surfaces with very high resolution, and together with Gerd ...
“for the invention and realization of atomic force microscopy, a breakthrough in measurement technology and nanosculpting that continues to have a transformative impact on nanoscience and technology.”
2016
neuroscience
- Eve Marder
Eve Marder
Read full bioEve Marder is the Victor and Gwendolyn Beinfield Professor of Neuroscience in the Biology Department. Marder grew up in New York and New Jersey, and gained her first degree in biology from Brandeis University, in 1969. She earned her PhD at the University of California, San Diego in 1975, and then worked at the University of Oregon in Eugene, and the École Normale Supérieure, Paris. She then returned to the Biology Department at Brandeis University, becoming a full professor in 1990. She has pioneered understanding of how a neural circuit can generate the necessary rhythmic firing patterns that control rhythmic muscle movements such as breathing, walking, and passage of food through the gut. Marder’s much feted contributions to neuroscience include membership of the US National Academy of Sciences and fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her awards include the Women in Neuroscience Mika Salpeter Lifetime Achievement Award (2002), the Gruber Award in Neuroscience (2013), and the George A. Miller Award from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (2012). - Michael M. Merzenich
Michael M. Merzenich
Read full bioMichael Merzenich is Professor Emeritus in Neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco. Born in Lebanon, Oregon, Merzenich gained a first degree in science at the University of Portland in 1964, and earned a PhD in physiology at Johns Hopkins University in 1968. After postdoctoral research at Madison, Wisconsin, he joined the UCSF Department of Otolaryngology, working on a prototype for today’s electronic cochlear implants. He was Co-Director of the Coleman Memorial Laboratory, then Co-Director of the Keck Center for Integrative Neuroscience at UCSF until retirement in 2007. From 1996 to 2003 he led the company Scientific Learning, then co-founded Posit Science, developing computer-based ‘brain training’ for enhancing cognitive performance. Merzenich is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine. His awards include the Zülch Prize of the Max-Planck Institute, the Purkinje Medal, and the Karl Spencer Lashley Award. - Carla J. Shatz
Carla J. Shatz
Read full bioCarla Shatz is Professor of Neurobiology and of Biology at Stanford University, and Director of Bio-X. Shatz grew up in West Hartford, Connecticut. She did her undergraduate degree at Radcliffe College, and studied with neurophysiologists Hubel and Wiesel at Harvard (who later won a Nobel Prize in 1981). After graduating in 1969, Shatz had a Marshall Scholarship to study physiology at University College London. She then became the first woman to gain a PhD from the Harvard Department of Neurobiology in 1976. In 1978 Shatz joined the Stanford University School of Medicine, and moved to UC Berkeley in 1992. She left the west coast in 2000 to become the first woman to lead a basic science department at Harvard Medical School, the Department of Neurobiology. In 2007, Shatz returned to Stanford to head Bio-X. Shatz is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, and the Royal Society, UK. Her awards include the Gill Prize in Neuroscience (2006), the Mika Salpeter ...
“for the discovery of mechanisms that allow experience and neural activity to remodel brain function.”
2016