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Featured Speakers (Cont.)
2006 Winter Meeting — Anchorage, AK
Jan. 21-25, 2006

Information about the plenary speakers and seesions is provided below. (Click on the name of an awardee to visit the "Awardee" page.)

 
 

Plenary Session I

 
Over the Moon with Carbon Nanotubes
Nadya MasonNadya Mason, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Monday, Jan. 23, 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m., Cook Hall

Nadya Mason received her bachelor’s degree in physics from Harvard University in 1995 and her Ph.D in physics from Stanford University in 2001, where she worked in the group of Aharon Kapitulnik. Her thesis research was on phase transitions in two-dimensional superconductors. She was subsequently a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, where she collaborated with Charles Marcus and Michael Tinkham on projects related to both carbon nanotubes and nanostructured superconductors. She is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she continues her work on nanotubes and superconductors, focusing on electron correlations in small-scale structures.
 
Plenary Session II
 
How I Learned To Stop Worrying About Schrodinger’s Cat
Hans Christian von BaeyerHans Christian von Baeyer, College of William and Mary
Tuesday, Jan. 24, 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m., Cook Hall

Hans Christian von Baeyer is Chancellor Professor of Physics at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Born in Berlin, Germany, von Baeyer graduated from Columbia University and earned his Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee in theoretical particle physics. After teaching at McGill University in Montreal he came to William & Mary where he has been for 37 years. In recognition of his contributions to mathematical physics he was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society. He has served as chairman of the William and Mary Physics Department, and as director of the Virginia Associated Research Campus, which he helped to transform into the Jefferson Lab. In 1990, von Baeyer was selected as one of the outstanding faculty members of the Commonwealth of Virginia. In recent years he has increasingly turned his attention to science writing, for which he won the 1991 National Magazine Award in the "Essays and Criticism" category. His latest book, Information: The New Language of Science, was published by Harvard University Press in 2004.
 
Plenary Session III
 
A Tale of Two Universes
Paul J. SteinhardtPaul J. Steinhardt, Princeton University
Wednesday, Jan. 25, 1:30 p.m.– 2:15 p.m., Cook Hall

Paul J. Steinhardt is the Albert Einstein Professor in Science at Princeton University and is on the faculty in the Department of Physics and the Department of Astrophysical Sciences. He received his B.S. in Physics at Caltech in 1974; his M.A. in Physics in 1975 and Ph.D. in Physics in 1978 at Harvard University. He was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows from 1978 to 1981, and Mary Amanda Wood Professor of Physics at the University of Pennsylvania from 1989 to 1998. He is a Fellow in the American Physical Society and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2002, he received the P.A.M. Dirac Medal from the International Centre for Theoretical Physics. Steinhardt’s research spans problems in particle physics, astrophysics, cosmology, and condensed matter physics. Recently, Steinhardt and Neil Turok (Cambridge Univ.) proposed the "cyclic model" of the early universe, a radical alternative to big bang/inÿationary cosmology in which the evolution of the universe is periodic and the key events shaping the large scale structure of the universe occur before the big bang.