The ICAM Fellows Selection Committee, chaired by Ka Yee Lee, has announced the awarding of one new Senior Fellowship, two individual Junior Fellowships (Track I), and two institutional Junior Fellowships (Track II).  These awards are intended to encourage research collaboration across disciplines and institutions and are funded by ICAM branch member institutional supporting costs.

The Senior award went to Catherine Pepin of CEA-Saclay, who will work with Ilya Vekhter of Louisiana State University on extending the “Kondo Breakdown” theory to include a description of the magnetically ordered and superconducting phases.  They will then work with the experimental group of Joe Thompson at LANL to test the resulting theory on a wide range of heavy fermions, including the so-called “115” series of compounds.

The two individual Junior Fellowships were awarded to

(1) Elad Harel, of the University of Chicago, who will work with Greg Engel at Chicago and Lucio Frydman at the Weizmann Institute, on DNA photostability and photodamage, using electronic quantum coherence.

(2) Tatiana Kuriabova of the University of Colorado at Boulder, who will work with Meredith Betterton at UC Boulder and Daniel Needleman at Harvard University on the theory of active liquid-crystalline gels and mitotic spindle self-organization.

The two mentor-driven awards, which go to collaborating mentors in partial support of a postdoctoral fellow, were to

(1) Vidya Madhavan of Boston College and Ward Plummer of Louisiana State University, who will work with a Boston-based postdoc on STM, LEED, and HREELS studies of Pnictides.

(2) Paul Goldbart of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and Xiangjun Xing of Syracuse University, who will be studying liquid crystalline elastomers and their structural and elastic randomness. Their postdoc will spend 9 month at Illinois and 2 months at Syracuse.

Continuing ICAM Junior Fellows in the second year of their respective fellowships include Clayton Lapointe, who is working with Thomas Mason and Ivan Smalyukh, and Gunnar Möller, who is working with Nigel Cooper and Victor Gurarie.

By Karie Friedman, ICAMNews, April 2009