ACA 2007 Awards

Randall receives Wood Award

Lisa Randall, Professor of Theoretical Physics at Harvard U., will receive the Elizabeth A. Wood Award at the 2007 ACA Meeting in Salt Lake City next July. The award was established in 1997 to honor the late Betty Wood, author of Crystals and Light, and Science From Your Airplane Window.The Wood Award is given to those who excel in bringing science to the attention of a wider audience.

Lisa’s book Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions, (HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 2005), has received high praise from critics. Tim Folger, editor of Best American Science and Nature Writing, says that Warped Passages “gives an engaging and remarkably clear account of how the existence of dimensions beyond the familiar three (or four, if you include time) may resolve a host of cosmic quandaries.

Gavezzotti receives Trueblood Award

Angelo Gavezzotti is one of the foremost chemical crystallographers in the world. Over a period of more than thirty years he has deeply influenced the way we think about molecular packing in crystals. He is the author of the UNI force field (with G. Filippini), of several crystallographic computer programs, such as OPEC (Organic Packing Energy Calculations), Zip-Promet (a program for the generation of possible crystal structures) and, most recently, the Semiclassical Density Sum Method (Pixel Method) for estimating intermolecular energies, all highly innovative, widely used and successful. He is an outstanding candidate for the ACA Kenneth N. Trueblood Award, which is to recognize exceptional achievement in computational or chemical crystallography.

Herbstein receives Fankuchen Award

Frank Herbstein’s work has illuminated chemical crystallographic perceptions for over half a century and has now culminated in the recent publication of his two-volume encyclopedic work on Crystalline Molecular Complexes and Compounds. Herbstein’s book will be a guide to the perplexed for many years. His lifetime achievements in research, teaching and scholarship eminently qualify him as a most suitable candidate for this award.