Three UC national laboratory scientists and two former postdoctoral fellows are among the nine recipients of the prestigious Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award for their exceptional contributions to research and development supporting the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) missions in science, energy, and national security, U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright announced last week (Oct. 13).

Established in 1959, the Lawrence Award recognizes mid-career U.S. scientists and engineers for groundbreaking achievements across nine scientific and engineering categories. The award is among the longest-running and most prestigious science and technology honors bestowed by the U.S. government.

Ernest O. Lawrence Award recipients — UC employees

Patrick Chain, Ph.D. (Los Alamos National Laboratory and New Mexico Consortium) — Biological and Environmental Sciences — Honored for his “pioneering work in genomics and microbiome science, including discoveries of new bacterial-fungal interactions and revolutionizing the field by democratizing access to advanced bioinformatics tools.”

Samuel W. Williams, Ph.D. (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) — Computer, Information, and Knowledge Sciences — Honored for his “pioneering contributions in performance modeling, hardware/software design optimization, and novel computer architecture for high-performance computing, enabling modeling of complex computational solutions, and increasing analysis speed, simulation accuracy, and computational efficiency.”

Andrea L. Kritcher, Ph.D. (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) — Fusion and Plasma Sciences — Honored for her “exceptional design efforts leading to the first-ever achievement of fusion ignition in the Laboratory, which is of major scientific impact to institutional and national missions, the private sector, and fusion interests within academia.” Kritcher earned her Ph.D. at UC Berkeley while a Lawrence Graduate Scholar and is a former Lawrence Postdoctoral Fellow at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Ernest O. Lawrence Award recipients — Former UC post-docs

Lijuan Ruan, Ph.D. (Brookhaven National Laboratory) — Nuclear Physics — Honored for her “outstanding leadership and ingenuity in the design, construction, and operation of novel detector systems in the STAR experiment, transforming dilepton final states into precision probes of heavy ion collisions.” Prior to her work at Brookhaven, Ruan was a postdoctoral fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she continued the work for which she earned her Ph.D.

Eric J. Schelter, Ph.D. (University of Pennsylvania) — Atomic, Molecular, and Chemical Sciences — Honored for his “fundamental chemical studies of energy-critical metals leading to new methods for their selective and sustainable separations.” Prior to becoming a professor at Penn, Schelter was a Glenn T. Seaborg Postdoctoral Fellow, Director’s Postdoctoral Fellow, and Frederick Reines Postdoctoral Fellow in Experimental Sciences, all at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Read the whole story at the UC Newsroom

About

View all post by