Paul Alivisatos, Berkeley Lab director and UC Berkeley professor, has won the prestigious Wolf Foundation Prize in Chemistry for 2012. Alivisatos is an internationally recognized authority on nanochemistry and a pioneer in the synthesis of semiconductor quantum dots and multi-shaped artificial nanostructures. He shares this year’s Wolf Prize in Chemistry with fellow nanoscience expert Charles Lieber of Harvard University.

Saul Perlmutter of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Physics Division and the University of California at Berkeley has won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe through observations of distant supernovae. Perlmutter, a founder of the Supernova Cosmology Project at Berkeley Lab, shares the prize with Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess, members of the High-z Supernova Search Team who made the same discovery.

President Obama has named two Berkeley Lab researchers, Christian Bauer of the Physics Division and Feng Wang of the Materials Sciences Division, among the 13 Department of Energy scientists who are recipients of the 2011 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. This year’s 94 winners were nominated by 14 government agencies. In addition to a plaque and citation, the awards continue research funding for up to five years and are considered the U.S. government’s highest honor to young scientists.

When people ask Greg Alushin what he did this summer, he could tell them he went on a yacht cruise with a Swedish countess on Lake Constance in Bavaria. But he actually did something even more exciting than that—Alushin was one of a select group of young researchers chosen to attend a week of lectures and lunches with Nobel laureates.

Berkeley Lab researchers have won four DOE Office of Science Early Career Research Program awards, in the second year of the planned annual award program. The five-year, $2.5 million awards are intended to support young scientists in the formative stages of their careers. The winners were chosen from over a thousand applicants by outside scientific experts.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Distinguished Scientist Art Rosenfeld has been awarded the Global Energy International Prize for his contributions to the field of energy efficiency. In announcing the prize, the organization said: “Arthur Rosenfeld is known for his innovation and technological research in the field of construction of energy-efficient buildings.”

Berkeley Lab’s Saul Perlmutter has won the Einstein Medal presented annually by the Albert Einstein Society of Bern, Switzerland, for his role in discovering the accelerating expansion of the universe by observing very distant supernovae.

Berkeley Lab’s Gabor Somorjai, widely considered the “father of modern surface chemistry,” has won a Frontiers of Knowledge Award from Spain’s BBVA Foundation. He was recognized for “his pioneering contributions to the understanding of surface chemistry and catalysis at a microscopic and molecular level.”

Berkeley Lab scientists Gavin Crooks and Trent Northen have been named by President Barack Obama to receive the prestigious Presidential Early Career for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) Award, the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on early-career researchers.

Berkeley Lab’s Alexandre Chorin (left) and James Sethian won prestigious prizes from the International Council for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM) for groundbreaking work in applied math, with impacts ranging from fluid mechanics and aerodynamics to medical imaging and semiconductor manufacturing. Chorin won the Lagrange Prize and Sethian won the Pioneer Prize. The awards bring to Berkeley Lab two of the five math prizes the ICIAM awards every four years.