This Week's Stories Regular Features: News Briefs Awards More About... Obituaries		Shamit Kachru Shamit Kachru, assistant professor of physics, has been selected as a research fellow by the New York-based Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The fellowship carries with it a grant of $35,000. “This is an extraordinarily competitive award,” wrote foundation president Ralph E. Gomory, “involving nominations for most of the very best scientists of your generation from around the country.” Kachru earned his BA at Harvard and his MA and PhD at Princeton, all in physics. His research focuses primarily on uncovering the physics of string theory, a unified theory attempting to explain fundamental particles that occur in nature. Paul Witherspoon Paul Witherspoon, professor emeritus of materials science and mineral engineering, received high marks in 1997 from his alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was named winner of the 1997 University of Illinois Geology Alumni Achievement Award in recognition of his contributions to the field of hydrogeology and his role as a mentor to many other researchers. Over the last 40 years, Witherspoon has studied the flow of groundwater through fractured rocks, the subsurface migration of contaminated groundwater and methods for isolating high-level radioactive waste underground. Steven McCanne Steven McCanne, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, has received the ACM Dissertation Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. McCanne earned his doctorate from Berkeley in 1996, the same year he joined the faculty. His award-winning dissertation is on “Scalable Compression and Transmission of Internet Multicast Video.” He specializes in multimedia networking and multicast communications, applying both to innovations in distance learning.

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