Seven Berkeley Lab researchers were on a list of 61 winners announced this week as recipients of the fourth Early Career Research Program managed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. They include Aydin Buluç, Felix Fischer, Daniel Haxton, Alexander Hexemer, Dominique Loque, Gabriel Orebi Gann, and George Pau.

The National Academy of Sciences announced the election of two Berkeley Lab researchers to this year’s class of 84 new members and 21 foreign associates from 14 countries. They were elected in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Representing Berkeley Lab this year are James Berger from the Physical Biosciences Division and James Sethian from the Computational Research Division.

Four Berkeley Lab scientists have been elected to the 2013 class of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an honorary society founded in 1780 to recognize leading “thinkers and doers.” The new members affiliated with Berkeley Lab are Frances Hellman and Don Tilley of the Materials Sciences Division and Chemical Sciences Division respectively, Susan Marqusee of the Physical Biosciences Division, and Hitoshi Murayama of the Physics Division.

Berkeley Lab’s Distinguished Scientist Emeritus Art Rosenfeld has been awarded one of the nation’s top prizes for his contributions to the field of energy efficiency.

The announcement came Dec. 21 when President Barack Obama named Rosenfeld one of eleven extraordinary inventors as recipients of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, one of the highest honors bestowed by the United States Government upon scientists, engineers, and inventors.

John Byrd, Derun Li, David Robin, and Carl Schroeder of the Accelerator and Fusion Research Division, Zoltan Ligeti of the Physics Division, and Howard Padmore of the Advanced Light Source are 2012 Fellows of the American Physical Society.

Through UC Berkeley and the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has made a $2.1 million grant to Berkeley Lab’s BigBOSS project. The grant funds the development of key technologies for modifying the 4-meter Mayall Telescope on Kitt Peak and constructing a precision instrument to study dark energy by mapping tens of millions of galaxies and quasars over the entire Northern Hemisphere sky.

Two Berkeley Lab research projects were awarded grants by the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to advance energy technologies. The two grants total nearly $5 million. One will focus on smart window technologies and the other on thermal mapping of buildings.

Susan Celniker of Berkeley Lab’s Life Sciences Division and Wim Leemans of the Accelerator and Fusion Research Division have been named 2012 Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

During the Open House Lecture Series on October 13 one of the last remaining unnamed roads on the Berkeley Lab site was christened for the 2011 Nobel Prize winner in Physics, Saul Perlmutter. There may be billions of stars in the sky but there aren’t many streets left to be named after Nobel Prize winners. When it comes to road names, the Lab’s future Nobelists could face a serious road shortage — one more reason we need a second campus.

A team led by Berkeley Lab’s Ashok Gadgil is the recipient of the 5th Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water. The prize recognizes his team for developing an innovative technology for affordable arsenic-safe drinking water in Bangladesh and nearby regions.