45970- 2013 fermi awards - final program book-1.13.14

An award given by the President of the United States

and the U.S. Department of Energy

THE ENRICO FERMI AWARDS CEREMONY

45970- 2013 Fermi Awards - Program Book.indd 1 1/13/14 3:58 PM

President Barack Obamaand

Secretary Ernest J. Moniz

Welcome you to the presentation of the

2013 ENRICO FERMI AWARDS

to

Allen J. Bard

and

Andrew Sessler

February 3, 20143:00 pm

at the uS Department oF energy

1000 InDepenDence avenue, SWWaShIngton, Dc 20585

WELCOME

45970- 2013 Fermi Awards - Program Book.indd 2-3 1/13/14 3:58 PM

Allen J. Bard

Background

Allen J. Bard was born in New York City on December 18, 1933 and grew up and attended public schools there, including the Bronx High School of Science (1948-51). He attended The City College of the College of New York (CCNY) (B.S., 1955) and Harvard University (M.A., 1956, Ph.D., 1958).

Dr. Bard joined the faculty at The University of Texas at Austin (UT) in 1958, and has spent his entire career there. He has been the Hackerman-Welch Regents Chair in Chemistry at UT since 1985. In 1973, he spent a sabbatical at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in the lab of Jean-Michel Savéant, and a semester in 1977 at the California Institute of Technology, where he was a Sherman Mills Fairchild Scholar. He was also a Baker lecturer at Cornell University in the spring of 1987 and the Robert Burns Woodward visiting professor at Harvard University in 1988.

He has worked as mentor and collaborator with 83 Ph.D. students, 18 M.S. students, 190 postdoctoral associates, and numerous visiting scientists. He has published over 850 peer-reviewed research papers and 75 book chapters and other publications, and has received over 23 patents. He has authored three books, Chemical Equilibrium (1966), Electrochemical Methods—Fundamentals and Applications (1980, 2nd Ed., 2001, with L. R. Faulkner), and Integrated Chemical Systems: A Chemical Approach to Nanotechnology (1994). He served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Chemical Society 1982-2001. His many awards include the ACS Priestly Medal (2002), the Welch Foundation Award in Chemistry (2004), the Wolf Foundation Prize (2008), Distinguished Scientist Award (Southeastern

citation

“For international leadership in electrochemical science and technology, for advances in photoelectrochemistry and photocatalytic materials, processes, and devices, and for discovery and development of electrochemical methods including electrogenerated chemiluminescence and scanning electrochemical microscopy.”

Recipient

Enrico FErmi AwArds


Universities Research Association – SURA) in 2009, and the 2011 National Medal of Science (awarded February 2013). His research interests involve the application of electrochemical methods to the study of chemical problems and include investigations in scanning electrochemical microscopy, electrogenerated chemiluminescence, and photoelectrochemistry.

Enrico FErmi AwArds


Background

Dr. Andrew Sessler is recognized for his pioneering work to make accelerators powerful tools of scientific discovery, the advancement of energy research, leadership for the national physics community, and championing freedom of scientific inquiry worldwide. Sessler was born in New York City in 1928. He received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard University in 1949 and doctorate from Columbia University in 1953. Following a postdoctal position at Cornell, he became an assistant, and then an associate professor at Ohio State University, moving to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in 1961. He served as its Director from 1973 to 1980.

Beginning in the 1950s, Sessler gained international recognition for developing particle accelerators and beam science. His work helped enable high-energy colliders, synchrotron light sources, and free-electron lasers, which are vital for current and future scientific discoveries. He established the theoretical basis for successful electron storage rings and colliding beam accelerators. He pioneered and developed the theoretical tools to analyze the instabilities limiting high-current beams, and applied these tools to develop design specifications enabling storage rings and colliders to reach high luminosities. He was awarded the Lawrence Award in 1970 for these advances. In the 1980s, Sessler contributed to the development of high-intensity free electron lasers (FELs), co-leading the pioneering FEL experiments at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. More recently, Sessler advanced muon storage rings, and has been Spokesperson of the U.S. Neutrino Factory and the Muon Collider Collaboration. He also developed medical techniques, including ion beams for cancer treatment.

citation

“For advancing accelerators as powerful tools of scientific discovery, for visionary direction of the research enterprise focused on challenges in energy and the environment, and for championing outreach and freedom of scientific

inquiry worldwide.”

Enrico FErmi AwArds

Andrew SesslerRecipient


Beginning the 1960s, Sessler helped usher in a new era of energy-efficiency and sustainable-energy research for the Atomic Energy Commission, the Energy Research and Development Administration, and the Department of Energy. Under Sessler’s leadership, LBNL established new divisions for energy and environmental research, including new programs in building sciences, energy efficiency, air quality, and the nation’s largest geothermal research program. Under Sessler’s leadership, LBNL grew to more than 5,000 employees, many dedicated to new fields of energy and environmental research.

Sessler served as President of the American Physical Society (APS) in 1998, and led the preparation of the APS Centennial, the largest physics meeting ever held, attracting approximately 10,000 scientists. Earlier he succeeded in having the APS create the new Division of the Physics of Beams. He promoted APS outreach to Latin America, and worked to increase the number of APS geographical sections, leading to the establishment of three new APS sections. Earlier, he chaired the APS Panel on Public Affairs, and subsequently chaired the APS Forum on Physics and Society, addressing physics issues affecting society as a whole. Sessler’s leading role in promoting scientists’ human rights and free inquiry was made possible by his broad contacts among the international accelerator community and national scientific leadership. He co-founded Scientists for Sakharov, Orlov, and Sharansky, and also served as 1982 Chair of the APS Committee on International Freedom of Scientists, as well as on the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Human Rights 2007-2012.

The APS awarded Sessler the first Dwight Nicholson Medal for Human Outreach in 1994 , and he also received its Wilson Prize in 1997. Amongst many additional honors, Dr. Sessler was elected Fellow, the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the New York Academy of Sciences. He is a member of Sigma Xi, a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences.

Enrico FErmi AwArds


The Enrico Fermi Award was established in 1956 to perpetuate the memory of this brilliant scientist, to recognize others of his kind and to inspire by his example. The Award recognizes exceptional and altogether outstanding achievements in the development, use or control of energy. (We interpret energy to include nuclear, atomic, molecular and particle interactions and effects.) The Award is not restricted to U.S. citizens and is given only to persons of international reputation whose careers have been marked by continued outstanding achievements in the field of energy.

Enrico Fermi was born in Rome in 1901. He was a self-taught scientific child prodigy. By the age of 17, he had not only acquired what his contemporaries considered an advanced graduate-level education in classical physics, but was also quite proficient at building electric motors. This passion for both the theoretical and the practical was to characterize Fermi’s entire career and distinguish him from most other scientists.

He received his doctorate from the University of Pisa in 1922. During 1923-1924, he studied in Gottingen, Germany with Max Born and in Leiden, the Netherlands with Paul Ehrenfest. From 1924-1926, Fermi lectured in mathematical physics and mechanics at the University of Florence. Based on his already numerous contributions to general theories of relativity, and especially his statistics of particles obeying the exclusion principle, Fermi was awarded the coveted first chair of theoretical physics at the University of Rome, where he taught for 12 years. By 1927 he was already a leading theoretician in the international scientific community.

In the 1930s, Fermi made a series of monumental contributions in physics. He developed the theory of beta decay based on Wolfgang Pauli’s hypothesis of the neutrino. As part of his theory, Fermi introduced a new fundamental constant of nature, the Fermi constant, which plays a role analogous to that of the charge of an electron in electromagnetism. Soon thereafter, other researchers were to discover artificial radioactivity, which provided the experimental activity Fermi pursued for the rest of his life.

THE LIFE OF ENRICO FERMI

Enrico FErmi AwArds


Like many other Europeans, Fermi’s life was affected by the changing political dynamic of the 1930s. Although he remained silent, Fermi deeply resented the Fascist racial laws instituted in 1938 and their implications for his wife Laura, who was Jewish. When he learned that he was to receive the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1938, he decided to use the occasion to flee. Fermi and his family sailed directly from the ceremony in Stockholm to New York City. His Nobel Prize citation read, “To Professor Enrico Fermi of Rome for his identification of new radioactive elements produced by neutron bombardment and his discovery, made in connection with this work, of nuclear reactions affected by slow neutrons.” In his wife’s words, “Four years of patient researches; the broken and the unbroken tubes full of beryllium powder and radon; the strenuous races along the hall of the physics building to rush element after element to the Geiger counters; the efforts to understand nuclear processes, and the many tests to prove the theories . . . these had won the Nobel Prize for Enrico.”*

Fermi took a teaching position at Columbia University. Soon after, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman discovered fission. Fermi and others immediately grasped the significance of secondary neutrons and perhaps a chain reaction: Fermi immediately focused his experiments on causing a chain reaction.

When the Manhattan Project was established in 1942, he was made responsible for chain reaction and plutonium research. From 1942 to 1944, he worked at the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago, where in a makeshift laboratory under Stagg Field Stadium, his team of scientists designed and built the first nuclear reactor. On December 2, 1942, Fermi led the epochal experiment that demonstrated the first self-sustained chain reaction. More than any individual, Enrico Fermi was responsible for the controlled release of nuclear energy. His achievement allowed the U.S. to produce the atomic bomb that helped end World War II.

Fermi became a U.S. citizen in 1944. In 1944-1945, he became Associate Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. In 1946, he returned to the University of Chicago as a professor at the Institute of Nuclear Studies, which now bears his name. He resumed his fundamental research interests in nuclear and elementary particle physics and, beginning in 1950, served as one of the first members of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission.

On October 16, 1954, President Eisenhower and the Atomic Energy Commission gave Fermi a special award for his lifetime of accomplishments in physics and, in particular, for the development of atomic energy. Fermi’s other research included the development of the Fermi-Dirac particle statistics, the theory of beta-decay, the Thomas-Fermi model of the atom, and a theory of the origin of cosmic rays. Enrico Fermi died of cancer on November 28, 1954. In 1942, Fermi harnessed the atom and opened the door to a new scientific realm. Now seventy years later, nuclear energy provides a significant part of the world’s electrical power and radioactive materials are used for hundreds of medical, agricultural, and industrial applications – from cancer therapy to food preservation to checking the integrity of welds in pipelines and bridge supports to gauges that measure the thickness of coatings applied to paper.

* Laura Fermi, Atoms in the Family, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1954, p. 123.

Enrico FErmi AwArds


The Enrico Fermi Award is a Presidential award, one of the oldest and most prestigious science and technology awards given by the U.S. Government. It recognizes scientists of international stature for their lifetimes of exceptional achievement in the development, use, control or production of energy (broadly defined to include the science and technology of nuclear, atomic, molecular and particle interactions and their effects on mankind and the environment).

On November 6, 1954, President Eisenhower and the Atomic Energy Commission honored Enrico Fermi with a special award for his lifetime of accomplishments in physics and in particular for the development of atomic energy. Twelve days later, the Italian-born naturalized American citizen died of cancer at the age of 53.

The Enrico Fermi Award was established in 1956 as a memorial to the 1938 Nobel Laureate in physics, who achieved the first nuclear chain reaction – and thereby initiated the atomic age – on December 2, 1942 on a squash court under the stands of the University of Chicago’s football stadium. The first Fermi Award recipients included physicists John von Neumann, Ernest O. Lawrence, Hans Bethe and Edward Teller.

The Enrico Fermi Award is given to encourage excellence in energy science and technology; to show appreciation to scientists, engineers and science policymakers who have given unstintingly over their lifetimes to benefit mankind through energy science and technology; and to inspire people of all ages through the example of Enrico Fermi, whose achievements opened new scientific and technological realms, and the Fermi Award laureates who have continued in his tradition.

THE ENRICO FERMI AWARD ENRICO FERMI AWARD LAUREATES

1992: Harold Brown

John S. Foster, Jr.

Leon M. Lederman

1990: George A. Cowan

Robley D. Evans

1988: Richard B. Setlow

Victor F. Weisskopf

1987: Luis Alvarez

Gerald F. Tape

1986: Ernest D. Courant

M. Stanley Livingston

1985: Norman Rasmussen

Marshall Rosenbluth

1984: Georges Vendryés

Robert R. Wilson

1983: Alexander Hollaender

John H. Lawrence

1982: Herbert Anderson

Seth Neddermeyer

1981: W. Bennett Lewis

1980: Rudolf E. Peierls

Alvin M. Weinberg

2013: Allen J. Bard

Andrew Sessler

2010: Mildred S. Dresselhaus

Burton Richter

2009: John Bannister Goodenough

Siegfried S. Hecker

2005: Arthur H. Rosenfeld

2003: John N. Bahcall

Raymond Davis, Jr.

Seymour Sack

2000: Sheldon Datz

Sidney D. Drell

Herbert F. York

1998: Maurice Goldhaber

Michael E. Phelps

1996: Mortimer M. Elkind

Richard L. Garwin

H. Rodney Withers

1995: Ugo Fano

Martin D. Kamen

1993: Freeman J. Dyson

Liane B. Russell

Enrico FErmi AwArds


Enrico FErmi AwArds

1978: Wolfgang K.H. Panofsky

Harold M. Agnew

1976: William L. Russell

1972: Manson Benedict

1971: Shields Warren

StaffordL.Warren

1970: Norris E. Bradbury

1969: Walter H. Zinn

1968: John A. Wheeler

1966: Otto Hahn

Lise Meitner

Fritz Strassmann

1964: H.G. Rickover

1963: J.R. Oppenheimer

1962: Edward Teller

1961: Hans A. Bethe

1959: Glenn T. Seaborg

1958: Eugene P. Wigner

1957: Ernest O. Lawrence

1956: John von Neumann


THE ENRICO FERMI AWARDS CEREMONY

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45970- 2013 fermi awards - final program book-1.13.14

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