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December 6, 2011: Nicholas McConnell, a University of California, Berkeley Astronomy graduate student and his professor Chung-Pei Ma (Miller Professor Fall 2010) discovered two enormous black holes: two objects in distant space whose center is more than 300 million light years away from Earth. This week the report of their discovery was published in the journal Nature.

 

October 4, 2011: Saul Perlmutter (Senior Miller Fellow), a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a faculty senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), led the Supernova Cosmology Project that, in 1998, discovered that galaxies are receding from one another faster now than they were billions of years ago. He will share the prize with Adam G. Riess (Miller Fellow 1996-1998, and Brian Schmidt....Nobelprize.org press release

     

October 2011: David Shelly (Miller Fellow 2007-2008) and Feng Wang (Miller Fellow 2005-2008) among Early-Career Scientists awarded by White House. “President Obama today named 94 researchers as recipients of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers, the   highest honor bestowed by the United States government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers.” More

 

September 30, 2011: Gabor Somorjai (Miller Professor 1977-1978, Miller Senior Fellow 2009-2014) has been awarded the Honda Foundation’s Home Prize 2011 for his pioneering contributions to surface science.

 

September 29, 2011: Peidong Yang (Miller Professor 2009) won the MRS Medal for "outstanding contributions in the creative synthesis and assembly of semiconductor nanowires and their heterostructures, and innovations in nanowire-based photonics, thermoelectrics, solar energy conversion and nanofluidic applications."

September 29, 2011: Paul Alivisatos (Miller Professor 2001) won the Von Hippel Award, the Materials Research Society's highest honor, "for the development of the fundamental scientific basis for growing and utilizing defect-free colloidal semiconductor nanoparticles, providing the basis for biological imaging, solid state lighting and the capture and conversion of solar energy to electricity."

September 26, 2011: Dr. Grigory Perelman (Miller Fellow 1993-1994) was featured in an article concerning the Clay Chair at the Institut Henri Poincaré. “The Chair is financed for   a period of five years with the Clay Millennium Prize funds for resolution of the Poincaré conjecture. The conjecture was solved in the affirmative by Grigory Perelman...In establishing this chair with IHP, CMI aims to provide an exceptional opportunity for mathematicians of great promise to   develop their ideas and pursue their research, just as Grigory Perelman was afforded such an opportunity by a fellowship at the Miller Institute in 1993-95. Clay Mathematics Institute

 

September 8, 2011: Corrie Moreau (Miller Fellow 2007-2008), was featured in a graphic novel (pdf) about her life and work, part of The Romance of Ants, a temporary exhibition at The Field Museum in Chicago (July 30, 2010 to January 1, 2012) that she curated.

 

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August 2011: Jillian Banfield Miller Professor 2006-2007), featured in Innovations: Research & News from Berkeley Engineering and UC Berkeley New Center, was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Earth and Environmental Science and L’Oreal-UNESCO for Women in Science award - for groundbreaking work on how microbes alter rocks and interact with the natural world.

 

July 11, 2011: Randy W. Schekman (Miller Senior Fellow 2008-2013), featured in Howard Hughs Medial Institute News, was named the first editor of a new journal that the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society, and the Wellcome Trust aim to launch next year.

 

June 10, 2011: Gabor Somorjai (Miller Professor 1977-1978), Miller Senior Fellow 2009-2014) has been awarded the Eni Award as well as the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences.

 

June 7, 2011: The Miller Institute was featured in a Physics Today Blog post concerning the annual Miller Institute Symposium.

 

June 6, 2011: Heino Falcke (Visiting Miller Professor Fall 2006) has been awarded the Spinoza Prize from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NOW).

 

June 1, 2011: Marc Davis (Miller Professor 1986-1987, Spring 2000) has been awarded the Gruber Cosmology Prize for his work on dark matter.

 

May 25, 2011: David Chandler (Miller Professor Fall 1991, Miller Professor 1999-2000, Executive Committee 2002-2008)has been elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London

 

  --LBNL Press Release

 

May 17, 2011: Paul Licht (Miller Professor 1973-1974) was featured in a UC Berkeley News Center article concerning the new Illustrated Guide to Common Animals of the East Bay Hills.

 

May 17, 2011: Eva Schmid (Miller Fellow, 2008-2011) was featured in Austrian newspaper Der Standard for her research on membrane composition.

 

May 12, 2011: Ray Jayawardhana(Miller Fellow 2000-2002) and Anne Pringle (Miller Fellow 2001-2004) have been awarded Radcliffe Institute Fellowships.

 

May 2, 2011: Bin Yu (Miller Professor Spring 2004) has been invited to deliver the 2012 Turkey Memorial Lecture in Statistics at the 8th World Congress in Probability and Statistics, the quadrennial joint conference of the Bernoulli Society and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. The Turkey Lecturer is chosen every four years by the Bernoulli Society Subcommittee on Named Lectures for the World Congress; it is one of the highest academic honors bestowed by the Bernoulli Society.

 

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April 28, 2011: Jasper Rine (Executive Committee 2010-2011, Miller Professor Fall 1993) was featured in ScienceMatters@Berkeley in an article about his research on the human genome.

 

April 21, 2011: Prashant Jain (Miller Fellow, 2008-2011) was featured in a Daily Cal article concerning his research on plasmonics.

 

April 19: 2011: The following Miller Members have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences:

·        Anna Behrensmeyer (Miller Fellow 1973–1975)

·        Glenn Fredrickson (Visiting Miller Professor Fall 1993)

·        Martin Head-Gordon (Miller Professor 2001–2002)

·        Michael Jordan (Miller Professor Fall 2008)

 

April 7, 2011: Bjorn Poonen (Miller Professor Fall 2005) was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

 

April 4, 2011: Oliver Chadwick (Visiting Miller Professor Fall 1994), Liu Chen (Visiting Miller Professor Fall 1987), and Allen Goldstein (Miller Professor Spring 2011) have been elected fellows of the American Geophysical Union.

 

March 29, 2011: Saul Perlmutter (Miller Senior Fellow 2010-2015) is one of this year's two speakers at the annual UC Berkeley Faculty Research Lectures.

 

March 17, 2011: Robert Ritchie (Miller Fellow 1974-1976) is featured in a video on Smart Planet about metallic glass.

 

March 15, 2011: Jillian Banfield (Miller Professor 2006-2007) has been awarded a 2011 L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Award.

 

March 3, 2011: Donald DePaolo (Miller Professor 1997-1998) was interviewed for a UCB News Center article on the life history of a 4.5 billion-year meteorite.

 

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February 27, 2011: David Milstein (Visiting Miller Professor Spring 2006) has been awarded a Meitner Humboldt Research Award.

 

February 24, 2011: Sandra Faber (Visiting Miller Professor Spring 2005) has been named as one of the 2011 "Women of Influence" in the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal. UCSC Press Release

 

February, 24, 2011: Louise Glasswas featured in a Daily Cal article about her Miller Professorship award.

 

February 22, 2011: Connie Chang-Hasnain (Miller Professor 2003-2004) has been awarded the 2011 David Sarnoff Award from the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

 

February 20, 2011: Michael Marletta (Visiting Miller Professor Fall 2000) has been named president of The Scripps Research Institute, effective January 1, 2012. Press Release

 

February 19, 2011: Saul Perlmutter (Miller Senior Fellow 2010-2015) and Adam Reiss (Miller Fellow 1996-1998) share this year's Albert Einstein Medal.

 

·        LBNL Press Release

·        Berkeleyside article

·        Baltimore Sun article

·        Johns Hopkins University Gazette

 

February 18, 2011: Elchanan Mossel (Miller Fellow 2002-2005) and Dmitry Budker (Miller Professor 2002-2003) were both featured in the January/February edition of ScienceMatters@Berkeley.

 

February 17, 2011: Ray Jayawardhana (Miller Fellow 2000-2002) just published a book written for a popular audience entitled Strange New Worlds: The Search for Alien Planets and Life beyond Our Solar System. The book tour includes events in Boston, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Pasadena, Seattle, London, Melbourne and Toronto.

 

February 15, 2011: Joshua Eisner(Miller Fellow 2005-2008) and Jiaxing Huang (Miller Fellow 2004-2007) have both been awarded Sloan Fellowships.

 

February 10, 2011: Laurence Barron(Visiting Miller Professor Spring 1995) has been awarded the 2011 Chirality Medal, instituted by the Societa Chimica Italiana.

 

February 8, 2011: Jitendra Malik (Miller Professor Fall 2001) has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering. Press Release

 

February 2, 2011: Alexander Levitzki (Visiting Miller Professor Spring 2008) has been elected to the Academia Europaea (the Academy of Europe).

 

February 2011: Josef Dufek (Miller Fellow 2006-2008) was bestowed the George Walker Award. "The award recognizes achievements of recent outstanding graduate in the fields of research encompassed by IAVCEI, or also a recent graduate whose achievements in volcanology involved operating in difficult circumstances" IAVCEI.

 

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January 31, 2011: John Taylor (Miller Professor Fall 1999) and Louise Glass (Miller Professor 2011-2012) were both featured in a UC Berkeley News Center article on the analysis of bread mold genomes.

 

January 31, 2011: A College of Natural Resources announced Louise Glass (Miller Professor 2011-2012) as the recipient of a Miller Professorship award. Press Release

 

January 28, 2011: Gabor Somorjai (Miller Professor 1977-1978, Miller Senior Fellow 2009-2014) has been awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award "for his pioneering experimental and conceptual contributions to the understanding of surface chemistry and catalysis at a microscopic and molecular level." Press Release

 

January 28, 2011: Peidong Yang (Miller Professor Spring 2009) is featured in a College of Chemistry press release for his role in the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis.

 

January 28, 2011: Mark Hauber (Miller Fellow 2002-2005) was featured in a Nature article, giving advice to graduate students and postdocs, about writing for the peer reviewed literature.

 

January 18, 2011: Sandra Faber (Visiting Miller Professor Spring 2005) has been awarded the 2011 Henry Norris Russell Lectureship from the American Astronomical Society.

 

January 11, 2011: The following Miller members have been named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS):

·        Tamara Doering (Miller Fellow 1993-1995)

·        Michael J. Frisch (Miller Fellow 1983–1985)

·        Gerald McClearn (Miller Professor 1962-1963)

·        Hongkun Park (Visiting Miller Professor Fall 2003)

·        Eugene Wong (Miller Professor 1983 – 1984)

·        Patricia Zambryski(Miller Professor 2004–2005)

 

 

January 7, 2011: Bjorn Poonen (Miller Professor Fall 2005) was awarded the 2011 Chauvenet Prize (the mathematical analogue of the Pulitzer Prize).

 

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