Two University of Colorado at Boulder faculty have been elected Fellows of the prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science for 2004.
Physics Professor Margaret Murnane and adjoint CU-Boulder physics Professor Eric Cornell -- also a senior scientist at the National Institute for Standards and Technology in Boulder -- were honored at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Feb. 14 in Seattle. Cornell and Murnane each received an official certificate and a pin.
In 2004, 348 fellows of AAAS were elected by their science peers, according to the association. The individuals were selected for their efforts to advance science or foster applications that are deemed scientifically or socially distinguished.
Professor Murnane was honored for "significant contributions to the science of short-pulse lasers and their applications, especially to the understanding of laser-produced plasmas." Murnane and her husband, physics Professor Henry Kapteyn, with a team of campus colleagues and students have been able to use flashes of laser light to freeze the motion of processes that occur in atoms and electrons in intervals as short as 100 trillionth of a second.
Murnane, winner of a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship, or "genius grant," in 2000, said her work on short light pulses from lasers has applications for optical technology, faster computer chips, micro-machining, medical laser surgery and other fields.
Cornell was honored for the discovery of the Bose-Einstein condensate, or BEC, a new form of matter developed using extremely cold atoms in optical traps. Cornell and CU-Boulder physics Distinguished Professor Carl Wieman shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's
Professor Wolfgang Ketterle for the creation of BEC.
Founded in 1848, AAAS has worked to advance science for human well being through its projects, programs and publications in the areas of science policy, science education and international scientific cooperation.
AAAS and its journal Science, with nearly 140,000 individual subscribers and 272 affiliates in more than 130 countries, is the world's largest general federation of scientists.