Awards

05 December 2001 |

Information Systems & Technology/Workstation Support Services
The campus team that created the Connecting@Berkeley CD and support materials has received an award for the best software CD-ROM package from the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on University and College Computing Services.

The team includes seven staff members from Information Systems and Technology/Workstation Support Services: Ian Crew, Karl Grose, Mimi Mugler, Aron Roberts, Roger Rosenblum, Anthony Roybal and Greg Small.

The CD gives students, faculty and staff an easy way to configure their connection to the Internet through UC Berkeley. The 2002 version of the CD was recently released.

L&S Social Sciences honors four faculty
The Division of Social Sciences in the College of Letters and Science annually recognizes outstanding social science faculty for their contribution to teaching and service. This year's recipients of the teaching awards are professors Robin Einhorn, history; Stephen Hinshaw, psychology; and Arlie Hochschild, sociology.

The College's Distinguished Service award encourages and rewards tenured or tenure-track faculty who have been particularly generous, effective and responsible in serving their departments and the wider campus. This year's recipient is Eve Sweetser, professor of linguistics. Each recipient receives an honorarium of $3,000.

Robert Bea
Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Robert Bea received the Blakely Smith Medal from the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers for his "vital contributions to the safety and integrity of a broad range of offshore and marine systems."

Anil Chopra
Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Anil K. Chopra was awarded the 2001 Norman Medal from the American Society of Civil Engineers. The award is given for the best paper among all journals published by the society. Chopra won for his paper, co-authored by former graduate student Rakesh Goel, entitled "Evaluation of NSP to Estimate Seismic Deformation: SDF Systems," published in the Journal of Structural Engineering.

Norma Kobzina
The Berkeley Division of the Librarians Association of the University of California has honored Norma Kobzina of the Biosciences Library with the 2001 Distinguished Librarian Award.

Garrison Sposito of the College of Natural Resources nominated Kobzina as "one of the treasures of the Berkeley Library: devoted in service, consummately professional, and the epitome of what all academic librarians should be."

Supporting letters cited her national reputation for outstanding information management; her work with students in programs such as the Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program, the Haas Scholars Program and the Summer Research Opportunities Program; her creation of a library research section for hundreds of Biology 1B students; her mentoring of young librarians; her work with the United States Agricultural Information Network; and her effective participation on library committees and task forces.

Laurent El Ghaoui and Ion Stoica
Professors of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Laurent El Ghaoui and Ion Stoica received Okawa Foundation Research Grants in Information Technology. The awards, which come with a $10,000 research grant, are named after Isao Okawa, the Japanese industrialist and philanthropist who founded the Sega Corporation.

George Leitmann
The International Society for Dynamic Games honored George Leitmann, professor in the graduate school of mechanical engineering and an expert on game theory, by dedicating to him its annual five-day Workshop on Dynamic Games in Corsica last summer.

Andrei Okounkov
Andrei Okounkov, professor of mathematics, has been named one of 24 of the most promising young scientific researchers at universities across the United States by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. The science and engineering fellowship provides Okounkov with $125,000 per year over five years in unrestricted funds to support his scientific research.

Okounkov's fields are representation theory and combinatorics.

Packard Fellowships were established to give talented young people the resources they need to do top quality work and to develop the scientific leaders of the future.

Charles Townes
Berkeley Nobel laureate Charles Townes, professor in the graduate school, has received the Lomonosov Gold Medal, the highest award of the Russian Academy of Science. Lomonosov was a pioneer of Russian science and the founder of Moscow State University, Russia's first university. The physicist was honored for his body of work in masers and lasers, as well as his recent work on stellar interferometry at mid-infrared wavelengths.

Townes also was profiled in "Portraits of Great American Scientists," edited by Nobel laureate Leon Lederman and Judith Scheppler. George Smoot, professor of physics, was included as well. The book was recently published by the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy.

Laura D'Andrea Tyson
At an October award ceremony in Sacramento, the California National Organization for Women recognized Laura D'Andrea Tyson, dean of the Haas School of Business, for her work toward educational advancement for women in California. Presented at California NOW's first annual Educational Scholarship Luncheon, the award cited Tyson's achievements as the only woman currently leading a major business school in the U.S., and her service in the Clinton administration as an economist from 1993 to 1996.

As President Clinton's national economic adviser in 1995 and 1996, Tyson was the highest ranking woman in the White House and was also the first woman to chair the White House Council of Economic Advisers. She has written many books and articles on industrial competitiveness and trade and on the economics of central Europe.