awards
dr. dolittle | April 20, 2016
I am very excited to report this year's awardees from the Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology Section (CEPS) of the American Physiological Society!
The New Investigator Award is given to a young investigator who has made contributed significantly to the field of comparative and evolutionary physiology. This year's awardee is Casey Mueller from California State University, San Marcos.
Casey Mueller (middle) receiving the New Investigator Award. She is standing with the CEPS Chair, Dr. Michael Hedrick (left) and the 2016 August Krogh Distinguished Lecturer, Dr. Jon Harrison (right).
The…
jhalper | March 7, 2016Is this science writer jazzed that ninth-grade girls from a religious girls’ school in Jerusalem won a space/science contest? You bet your sweet solar-powered spacelab she is! It is not just that these girls beat out a lot of other classes (over 400), or that they break more than one stereotype. They also came up with a pretty clever idea for studying the Sun: Send a spacecraft to scatter assorted nanolabs all over an asteroid that is about to pass close to the Earth on its way to the Sun. The contest is held every year in memory of Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon, who went down with the crew of…
jhalper | July 21, 2015This year's CWTS Leiden Ranking put the Weizmann Institute at number 10 -- and number one outside of the US -- for impact.
What is impact? In dry terms, it is publications in excellent journals and citations, weighted for institute size and evaluated by subject. This prestigious ranking favors the Weizmann Institute, because it compares institutes and universities solely on the basis of published research.
So you can measure impact and give it a rank. But that number is, ultimately a proxy for something a bit more abstract: We really think of it as the part our scientists play in advancing…
jhalper | January 26, 2015 Prof. Nir Orion
Science Teaching researcher Prof. Nir Orion recently returned from Peru, where his award-winning Blue Planet teaching unit was adopted by the Peruvian Ministry of Education
Q: You have been working for many years to get schoolchildren out of the classroom setting. Why?
A: Schools in general and science teaching in particular are supposed to teach children about the world they live in. But they do it in a sterile environment that is disengaged from the real world; and thus many students do not find relevance or personal meaning in the subjects they “learn.”
There are, of…
jhalper | March 18, 2014Today’s new articles involve flow: the flow of positrons through the Universe and the flow of particles around the tiny cilia of corals. They involve beauty and mystery, as well. The particle flow, imaged in brilliant colors, won first place in the photography category of the 2013 Science/National Science Foundation International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge.
And positrons – the anti-matter opposites of electrons – have been found in large numbers flowing in near-Earth space. Weizmann Institute research points to an answer to one riddle: Why did a satellite monitoring…
jhalper | March 13, 2013Prof. Shafi Goldwasser, who is at both the Weizmann Institute and MIT, will receive the 2012 A.M. Turing Award, together with Prof. Silvio Micali of MIT. Goldwasser is only the third woman to receive the Award since its inception in 1966, and she is the third faculty member of the Weizmann Institute to receive what is considered to be the “Nobel Prize in computing.”
Goldwasser and Micali’s work in the 1980s laid the foundations of modern cryptography – the science that, among other things, keeps your electronic transactions secure.
The basis of their work is a series of riffs on the…
jhalper | August 1, 2012Science magazine seemed to imply there was some grousing about the new Fundamental Physics Prizes awarded by billionaire Yuri Milner, but we in Rehovot think it’s a good thing. While one can quibble about which fields are still underfunded, we believe that any support for truly basic research -- the kind whose applications, if they exist, will be decades in the future, but which enlightens today us about the universe we live in – is most welcome.
It turns out that two (at least) of the nine winners have ties to the Weizmann Institute, and, completely by chance, we had recently written about…
lborkowski | November 1, 2011One of my favorite parts of the American Public Health Association annual meeting is the Occupational Health & Safety Section's awards lunch. It's always inspiring to hear about and from the award recipients, who bring dedication, creativity, and much-needed stubbornness to the cause of ensuring safe and healthy workplaces. The 2011 honorees are:
Alice Hamilton Award: Martin Cherniack of the Center for the Promotion of Health in the New England Workplace (CPH-NEW), author of the book The Hawk's Nest Incident: America's Worst Industrial Disaster
Lorin Kerr Awards: Lamont Byrd of the…
sastyk | April 27, 2011I don't know that I ever announced this on the blog, but I'm off tomorrow to NYC for an event run by CUNY Feminist Press - last fall they named me one of 40 Young Feminist Writers under 40 whose work on food and environmental issues was changing the way people think about women's issues. I didn't make it to the October Gala for family reasons, but I'm excited to head downstate tomorrow and meet the other folks!
I admit, I'm excited that the context that I've been working to bring to connect our energy history to the way gender roles have changed has been noticed! I've won a bunch of awards…
lborkowski | February 18, 2011The American Association for the Advancement of Science is holding its annual meeting in DC this week, and the organization is presenting awards to "professional journalists for distinguished reporting for a general audience." An endowment from the Kavli Foundation funds the awards program, which gives $3,000 and a plaque to each winner.
I wasn't surprised to see that the winners included Charles Duhigg's New York Times "Toxic Waters" series and Richard Harris and Alison Richards' NPR series "Follow the Science: Calculating the Amount of Oil and Gas in the Gulf Oil Spill" (here and here, too…
lborkowski | November 18, 2010Last week at the American Public Health Association's annual meeting in Denver, APHA's Occupational Health and Safety section held its awards luncheon - always one of the highlights of the meeting thanks to its combination of stellar awardees and creative musical skit. This year's award winners won well-deserved recognition for the many ways in which they advance occupational health and safety.
Sherry Baron won the 2010 Alice Hamilton Award, which "recognizes the life-long contributions of individuals who have distinguished themselves through a career of hard work and dedication to improve…
esiegel | February 27, 2008It's been a spectacular week for the film space industry, and here at Starts With A Bang!, we've got the recap of all the highlights that you may have missed while watching the countless Oscar montages. Take your time browsing and enjoying this site, and maybe even find out what the question is if 42 is the answer! And now, without further ado, here are the winners from the 43rd Carnival of Space, as chosen by Ethan Siegel, your magnanimous host of this week's Carnival (and check out all previous carnivals here):
Nancy Young-Houser, of A Mars Odyssey, for Stellar Breakthrough Performance…