September 22, 2004

UCSD Physics Professor Wins 2004 E.O. Lawrence Award

By Kim McDonald

A professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego has been named to receive the U.S. Department of Energy’s highest honor, the E. O. Lawrence Award.

Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham today announced that Ivan Schuller of UCSD’s Division of Physical Sciences and Department of Physics is one of seven winners of the 2004 E.O. Lawrence Award, given for outstanding contributions in the field of atomic energy, broadly defined. Each winner will receive a gold medal, citation and $50,000 at a ceremony in Washington, DC on November 8.

Ivan Schuller Credit for photo: UCSD

The award was established in 1959 to honor the memory of the late Ernest Orlando Lawrence, a UC Berkeley physicist who invented the first subatomic particle accelerator, the cyclotron, and after whom two major Energy Department laboratories in Berkeley and Livermore, Calif., are named. It is given for achievements in seven categories.

Schuller was recognized for his achievements in the materials research category for “creating the field of metallic superlattices and recognizing the impact of these materials on magnetism and superconductivity.” He joins an illustrious group of previous UCSD winners of the Lawrence Award that include Herbert York, a physicist who was UCSD’s founding chancellor; Mark Thiemens, a chemist who is dean of UCSD’s Division of Physical Sciences; James Arnold, a chemist who was the founding chair of UCSD’s Department of Chemistry; and Sunil Sinha, a professor of physics.

“Professor Schuller is a shining example of the strength and international stature of UCSD’s faculty,” said Marye Anne Fox, UCSD’s new chancellor and one of the nation’s leading organic chemists. “Roger Revelle’s dream of building a university with the best and the brightest lives on at UCSD. I want to congratulate Professor Schuller on receiving this prestigious award and for helping to uphold the university’s commitment to excellence.”

The six other winners of this year’s Lawrence Award are Nathaniel Fisch, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and Princeton University; Bette Korber, Los Alamos National Laboratory; Claire Max, University of California, Santa Cruz and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Fred Mortensen, Los Alamos National Laboratory; Richard J. Saykally, University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Gregory W. Swift, Los Alamos National Laboratory.

“We are all enriched by the contributions these researchers have made ranging from engines with no moving parts to better ways to see the stars,” Energy Secretary Abraham said in announcing the winners. “These awards, and the research for which they are given, show that DOE could easily be called the Department of Science and Energy.”

Schuller, one of the 100 most cited physicists in the past 15 years, graduated from the University of Chile with a physics degree in 1970 and received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Northwestern University in 1972 and 1976, respectively. He became a naturalized citizen in 1980, when he was named Distinguished New Citizen. He was a senior scientist and group leader at Argonne National Labs and has been teaching and doing research at UCSD since 1987.

Schuller is Fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the Chilean Academy of Sciences, a Corresponding Fellow of the Belgian Academy of Science and a foreign member of the Spanish Academy of Science. He received the DOE Award for Outstanding Accomplishment in Solid State Physics, the Wheatley and the Adler Awards from the American Physical Society, the Materials Research Society Medal and the German Alexander von Humboldt Prize.

Additional information on the winners and their work is available on the web at www.sc.doe.gov

Media Contact:
Kim McDonald, UCSD (858) 534-7572
Jeff Sherwood, DOE (202) 586-4826
Comment: Ivan Schuller