Berkeleyan

Awards

25 February 2004

University Health Services garners workplace-wellness award
The California Task Force on Youth and Workplace Wellness recently named the winners of its first annual Fit Business Awards, which honor California employers who have shown outstanding commitment to employee health and wellness. The task force singled out seven businesses and organizations around the state —among them University Health Services at Berkeley.

In its citation, the public/private wellness group said that UHS, besides administering the campus medical outpatient facility, “encourages its employees to participate in health and fitness programs, including a regular walking group, an online weight-management program, and noontime educational programs on topics such as stress management, ergonomics, nutrition, and life-stage stressors.”

Tang Center staff members Alice Kubler and Pam Cameron accepted the award on behalf of UHS in Los Angeles last month. The other award winners were American Apparel (Los Angeles and Redwood City), Casa Dorinda (Montecito), L-3 Communications (Menlo Park), the Contra Costa County Schools Insurancce Group (Pleasant Hill), and NutriFit (Los Angeles).

AMS honors math profs
The American Mathematical Society (AMS) honored several Berkeley mathematicians at its joint meeting last month with the Society for Industrial Applied Mathematics in Phoenix, Ariz. Among them were Lawrence Evans and Mark Haiman.

Evans was named co-winner of the 2004 Leroy P. Steele Prize for a Seminal Contribution to Research. Presented annually by the society, the Steele Prize is one of the highest distinctions in mathematics. Evans was honored for a paper on fully nonlinear elliptic equations, which, the AMS said, “are of interest in many subjects, including the theory of controlled diffusion processes and differential geometry.”

Evans shares the prize with Nicolai Krylov of the University of Minnesota; the two independently “have made a variety of distinguished contributions to the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations,” the prize citation said.

Haiman received the 2004 E. H. Moore Research Article Prize. Presented every three years by the AMS, the Moore Prize recognizes an outstanding research article that appeared in one of the society’s primary research journals. Haiman was honored for his paper titled “Hilbert Schemes, Polygraphs, and the Macdonald Positivity Conjecture.” The prize citation states that the paper “has within the last two years already led to numerous other new developments at the interface of combinatorics, algebraic geometry, and representation theory.”

A third award, to Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab mathematician James Sethian, was cited in the Feb. 5 Berkeleyan.