Four faculty
elected to NAS
Four Caltech
professors were among the 72 new members and 15 foreign associates named
to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences at the organization’s
139th annual meeting in Washington, D.C., April 30. Established in 1863
by President Lincoln, the academy acts as an advisory body for the federal
government on scientific matters.
The new members
from Caltech are Barry Barish, Linde Professor of Physics and director
of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) laboratory;
Jacqueline Barton, Hanisch Memorial Professor and professor of chemistry;
Jeff Kimble, Valentine Professor and professor of physics; and Anatol
Roshko, Von Kármán Professor of Aeronautics, Emeritus. The
four bring to 67 the number of living Institute professors and professors
emeriti who have earned the honor.
An experimental
high-energy physicist, Barish has been involved with a number of high-profile
international projects, including the Superconducting Super-collider and
the search for magnetic monopoles. He was responsible for the definitive
experiment at Fermilab that provided evidence of the “weak neutral
current,” the linchpin of the electroweak theory for which Sheldon
Glashow, Abdus Salam, and Steven Weinberg won the Nobel Prize.
In 1994 Barish
began working on the LIGO project, an NSF-funded collaboration between
Caltech and MIT for detecting gravitational waves from exotic sources
such as colliding black holes, and he has been director since 1997. He
is also currently involved in the neutrino experiment inside Minnesota’s
Soudan Underground Mine. Barish came to Caltech in 1963, after receiving
his BS and PhD from UC Berkeley.
Since joining
Caltech in 1989, Barton has pioneered the application of synthetic transition-metal
complexes as tools for probing DNA. These complexes have been useful in
clarifying fundamental chemical principles, developing new diagnostic
tools, and laying a foundation for the design of novel chemotherapeutics
and biosensors. Barton has also carried out seminal studies that provide
a completely new approach to the study of DNA structure and dynamics,
studies that may be critical to understanding the chemical consequences
of radical damage to DNA within cells.
An alumna
of Barnard College, Barton obtained her PhD in chemistry from Columbia
University, and was on the faculty there before joining Caltech. A recipient
of numerous awards, medals, and honorary doctorates, including the prestigious
MacArthur Fellowship in 1991, she is a member of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
Kimble is
an expert in quantum optics and has made groundbreaking discoveries relating
to quantum measurement and to the new science of quantum information.
A continuing
theme of his research has been the generation and application of novel
quantum states such as “squeezed” light, work that has led to
a number of important discoveries. Exploiting the basic techniques of
light squeezing provided the foundation for his group’s attainment
of unconditional quantum teleportation in 1998. He and his colleagues
have also done seminal work in establishing the experimental foundations
of quantum information science and have made major contributions to theoretical
physics.
A 1978 graduate
of the University of Rochester, Kimble held the Sid Richardson Regents’
Chair in Physics at the University of Texas at Austin, before joining
Caltech in 1989. He is winner of the Franklin Institute’s Albert
A. Michelson Medal and the Optical Society of America’s Max Born
Award, and is a corecipient of the Einstein Prize for Laser Science.
Roshko is
known for his research in several areas of gas dynamics and fluid mechanics.
He has made contributions to problems of separated flow, bluff-body aerodynamics,
shock-wave boundary-layer interactions, shock-tube technology, and the
structure of turbulent shear flows.
A native
of Canada, Roshko earned his doctorate from Caltech in 1952 and has spent
his career at the Institute. He also served as acting director of Caltech’s
Graduate Aeronautical Labs from 1985 to 1987. Already a member of the
National Academy of Engineering, Roshko is also a fellow of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society, the American
Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and the Canadian Aeronautics
and Space Institute, and an honorary member of the Indian Academy of Sciences.
He is a founding director of Wind Engineering Research, Inc.
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