Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award Winners Announced

WASHINGTON, D.C. — U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu announced nine winners of the 2011 Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award for their contributions in research and development supporting the Department of Energy and its mission.

The Lawrence Award honors U.S. scientists and engineers, at mid-career, for exceptional contributions in research and development supporting the Department of Energy and its mission to advance the national, economic and energy security of the United States.

Winners in eight categories receive a gold medal, a citation and $20,000. They will also be honored at a ceremony in Washington, D.C. early next year.

“These researchers have made significant contributions to the national, economic, and energy security of the United States,” Chu said. “I congratulate the winners and thank them for their work on behalf of the Department and the Nation.”

Established in 1959, The Lawrence Award is named for Dr. Ernest Orlando Lawrence who invented the cyclotron, a particle accelerator, and after whom two major Energy Department laboratories in Berkeley and Livermore, Calif., are named.

The 2011 E.O. Lawrence Award winners are:

Atomic, Molecular, and Chemical Sciences
David E. Chavez (Los Alamos National Laboratory)
Chavez discovered new chemical synthetic schemes used to advance development of fundamentally novel, highly energetic, environmentally friendly (high‐nitrogen) molecular materials important to national security missions.

Biological and Environmental Sciences
Thomas P. Guilderson (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)
Guilderson is honored for groundbreaking radiocarbon measurements of corals, advancements in understanding the paleo-history of ocean currents and ocean processes revealing past climate variability, and the elucidation of how physical and biogeochemical oceanic processes affect the global carbon cycle.

Computer, Information, and Knowledge Sciences

Lois Curfman McInnes and Barry F. Smith (co-nominees, Argonne National Laboratory)
McInnes and Smith are honored for scientific leadership in advancing the innovative and transformative numerical software package PETSc, which provides robust, efficient, scalable, and extensible tools that are the backbone of numerous high-performance DOE simulation computer codes.

Condensed Matter and Materials Sciences:
Paul C. Canfield (Ames Laboratory)
Canfield is honored for innovative syntheses and high-quality single crystal solution growth of novel new materials and the collaborative consummate elucidation of their fundamental properties using a range of techniques.

Energy Science and Innovation:
Amit Goyal (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
Goyal pioneered research and transformative contributions to the field of applied high temperature superconductivity, including fundamental materials science advances and technical innovations enabling large-scale applications of these novel materials.

Fusion and Plasma Sciences:
Riccardo Betti (University of Rochester)
Betti is recognized for a series of impactful theoretical discoveries in the physics of inertial confinement fusion including seminal transformative work on thermonuclear ignition, hydrodynamic instabilities and implosion dynamics, and the development of innovative approaches to ignition and high energy gains.

High Energy and Nuclear Physics:

Bernard Matthew Poelker (Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility)
Poelker led a transformative effort to achieve production of electron beams possessing remarkable properties advancing parity-violation and polarization-transfer experiments now yielding key information on nucleon quark-gluon structure.

National Security and Nonproliferation:

Mark B. Chadwick (Los Alamos National Laboratory)
Chadwick is honored for innovative scientific contributions to advance understanding of fission product yields and other key nuclear reactions resulting in the resolution of a long-standing problem in national security.