The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) Editorial Board has selected six papers published by PNAS in 2011 to receive the Cozzarelli Prize, an award that recognizes outstanding contributions to the scientific disciplines represented by the National Academy of Sciences. Papers selected were chosen from more than 3,500 research articles that appeared in the journal last year and represent the six broadly defined classes under which the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is organized.
The 2011 Cozzarelli Prize in physical and mathematical sciences was for a paper by former MIT graduate student Jacob R. Waldbauer, Professor of Geobiology Roger E. Summons and Dianne K. Newman, formerly of MIT’s Department of Biology and now at the California Institute of Technology. The paper, titled, “Microaerobic steroid biosynthesis and the molecular fossil record of Archean life,” was published in PNAS on Aug. 8, 2011.
The annual Cozzarelli Prize acknowledges papers that reflect scientific excellence and originality. The award was established in 2005 and named in 2007 to honor late PNAS Editor-in-Chief Nicholas R. Cozzarelli. The 2011 awards will be presented at the PNAS Editorial Board meeting, and awardees will be recognized at an awards ceremony during the NAS Annual Meeting on April 29 in Washington.
Nitrogen fixation in the polar ocean. Nanoengineered surfaces and coatings for enhanced water recovery. The impact of foreign chains on China's retail industry. These are just three of the 71 faculty international research projects that received $1,708,290 in funding from the 2011-2012 MISTI Global Seed Funds competition.
MISTI Global Seed Funds was established to enhance the internationalization of MIT research and education. The program is composed of a general pool of funds for projects in any country and several country-specific funds. In the latest grant cycle, MISTI offered significant new funds for collaboration with Belgium, Chile and Germany, as well as $1.7 million in matching funds for projects in Brazil from the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development. This growing initiative received 180 proposals, representing 17 percent of MIT faculty. See all the 2011-2012 Global Seed Funds projects
Since 2008, the program has received 377 proposals requesting a total of $9.6 million. The program has awarded nearly $2.2 million to 122 projects. In the current round, faculty and research scientists from 24 departments across the Institute submitted proposals for projects in 24 countries. Winning teams use grant funds to cover international travel, meeting and workshop costs. All awardees include undergraduate, graduate or postdoctoral student participation. MISTI will provide cultural preparation for participating students before their departure.
MIT's largest international program, MISTI is a pioneer in applied international studies. Each year, the program places some 600 MIT students in professional internships and research positions with its network of leading companies, universities, research institutes and Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) around the world. MISTI currently operates in 14 countries: Brazil, Chile, China, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Singapore, Spain and Russia. The program is a part of the Center for International Studies.
The next MISTI Global Seed Funds call for proposals will be announced in May with a proposal deadline in early fall. More details are available on the MISTI website: http://web.mit.edu/misti/faculty/seed.html
Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) Emeritus Professor Sidney Yip has been awarded the 2012 Robert Cahn Award. The award, given by the Journal of Nuclear Materials, recognizes an outstanding scientist who has a high scientific profile in the field of nuclear materials, the ability to communicate science to a broad audience and demonstrated interest in breaking down barriers between different scientific disciplines.
In his early years on the NSE faculty, Yip made pioneering contributions in the fields of transport phenomena and neutron scattering. He later began a program of theoretical, modeling and atomistic simulation studies of the properties of crystalline solids which soon established him as an international leader in this rapidly developing field.
He has contributed almost 300 journal articles and his monographs and handbooks are known around the world. Particularly notable from the early stage of his career is his monograph with Richard Osborn, Foundations of Neutron Transport Theory (1967). More recently the two-volume Handbook of Materials Modeling (2005) he edited stands as the defining reference in the field. The Handbook, a later volume on scientific modeling and simulation co-edited with Tomas de la Rubia, and the many workshops and conference sessions he has organized exemplify his remarkable — and perhaps unique — leadership role in helping to build the worldwide interdisciplinary community of researchers on multiscale materials modeling.
At MIT, Yip has supervised almost 50 doctoral students, many of them now pursuing highly productive careers at leading academic and research institutions around the world. Though he retired officially in 2009 after 46 years of extraordinary service on the faculty (the last nine of them also as a member of the faculty in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering), Yip is still very active in research, and a partial listing of his current affiliations and activities indicates the breadth of his interests and contributions: CASL, the DOE-funded Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (where he serves as deputy lead for materials performance and optimization); the Concrete Sustainability Hub at MIT; and the BP-funded Materials and Corrosion Center at MIT and the University of Manchester
As the winner of the 2012 Robert Cahn award, Yip will give a keynote lecture at the next NuMat Conference in Japan on Oct. 21-25.
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