Woman physicist among Franklin Institute honorees
Typically, the people who receive prestigious awards in the sciences are male and - because it can take decades to make an impact in a technical field - well above 50 years old.
Typically, the people who receive prestigious awards in the sciences are male and - because it can take decades to make an impact in a technical field - well above 50 years old.
Deborah Jin is neither.
Just 39, she is among 11 winners of this year's Franklin Institute awards, announced yesterday, for her pioneering work on the mysterious behavior of ultracold fermionic gases. The laureates are accomplished in areas ranging from robotics to RNA.
Jin is the youngest by more than a decade - but she's used to that sort of thing. At 34, she won a so-called "genius grant." She's been elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
"Her work has made a big splash," said Elias Burstein, an emeritus professor of physics at the University of Pennsylvania.
Jin's first breakthrough came in 1999, when she and her team cooled a gaseous form of potassium to just 300-trillionths of a degree above absolute zero, inducing the particles to behave in a wavelike state. That gave it some properties of a superconductor.
The gas was diluted to one-hundred-thousandth the density of air, and held captive in a magnetic trap.
"We cool the gas to very low temperatures, where clearly it doesn't want to be a gas," said Jin, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo. "That gas is so dilute that it takes it a long time to figure out it wants to be a solid. That's the trick."
The long-term goal of the field is to achieve superconductivity - that is, frictionless transport of electricity - at room temperature.
Other recipients are:
Takeo Kanade, Bower Award for Achievement in Science. The Carnegie Mellon professor is a pioneer in robotics, developing technologies ranging from automated face recognition to computer vision. One project led to creation of EyeVision, which gave a 360-degree perspective of the 2001 Super Bowl.
Frederick Smith, Bower Award for Business Leadership. Smith reinvented the notion of package delivery by founding FedEx Corp. in 1973; 14 small planes carried 186 packages the first night.
Victor Ambros, David Baulcombe and Gary Ruvkun, Benjamin Franklin medal in life science. The three worked on short strands of RNA that play a role in silencing genes.
Wallace Broecker, earth and environmental science. The top climate-change scientist is renowned for his study of how ocean currents affect climate and how they could be altered by the melting of polar ice caps.
Albert Eschenmoser, chemistry. The Swiss is known for his work on the structure of DNA and RNA, and for his groundbreaking synthesis of Vitamin B12 in 1972.
Judea Pearl, computer and cognitive science. The expert on artificial intelligence, works at the intersection of computer science and statistical probability.
Arun Phadke and James Thorp, electrical engineering. They reduced electricity blackouts by making computerized relays to diagnose problems in the power grid and protect it from harm.
More about all the honorees: http://go.philly.com/scienceEndText
