Two
Stony Brook Faculty Members Receive the Highest Recognition the
World and the Nation, Respectively, Bestow Upon Researchers
The 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics, “for
having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through
game-theory analysis,” was
shared by Robert Aumann of Hebrew University, who is a founder and
core, albeit part-time, member of the University’s Center for
Game Theory as Visiting Leading Professor in the Department of
Economics. The announcement was made in October, 2005, in Stockholm.
In November, 2005, President Bush announced that Professor
Dennis Sullivan, Mathematics, was a recipient of the 2004 National
Medal of Science, for pioneering scientific research across the
disciplines in the fields of topology, geometry and dynamical systems
as well as cross-disciplinary explorations in algebraic topology
inspired by string theory. Prof. Dennis Sullivan has also just
been awarded the American Mathematical Society’s Leroy P. Steele
Prize for Lifetime Achievement. The citation reads in part, "Beyond
the specific theories he has developed and the problems he has
solved ... his uniform vision of mathematics permeates his work and
has inspired those around him." A member of the National Academy
of Sciences, Prof. Sullivan is also on the faculty of the CUNY Graduate
Center and has taught at Princeton, MIT, the Institut des Hautes
Etudes Scientifiques in France, and Queens College. Both were the
second such awards for Stony Brook in three years: Chemist Paul
Lauterbur shared the 2003 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his seminal
contribution to the birth of the MRI —work performed at Stony
Brook in the 1970s—, and applied mathematician James Glimm was
a National Medal of Science Recipient in 2002 for his contributions
to shock wave theory, which develops mathematical models to explain
natural phenomena involving intense compression — air
pressure in sonic booms, crust displacement in earthquakes, and
the density of material in volcanic eruptions and other explosions.
Image of a computational model of drug targeting
HIV proteins
Second Watson Award Comes to Stony Brook
Prof. Robert C. Rizzo, Applied Mathematics
and Statistics, became the second Stony Brook researcher to receive
a James D. Watson Investigator Award from the New York State Office
of Science, Technology and Academic Research. Working in collaboration
with experimentalists, Prof. Rizzo will use the funds to employ computational
structural biology tools to screen potential small-molecule drugs for
the HIV/AIDS virus. The Watson Investigator Program serves, through
professional recognition and development, to facilitate New York’s
retention of top young scientific talent.
Researcher Leads Clinical Team to Madagascar
This past summer Distinguished Teaching Professor David
Krause, Anatomical Sciences, whose research on the fossil record takes him to
Madagascar frequently, and who founded the Madagascar Ankizy (children) Fund
in 1999 to mobilize help for the local children he and his research colleagues
meet daily in this, one of the poorest countries in the world, brought a team
of medical, dental and nursing students and faculty to the African island. With
Hospital Director Bruce Schroffel and health educator Lorrie Schroffel, they
brought in donated equipment and supplies, treated 1,000 patients in temporary
medical and dental clinics – the first medical care, and the first toothbrushes,
that many had ever received – offered basic nutritional and hygiene instruction
both to patients and to health care providers and administrators, and inaugurated
the second Ankizy-funded school.