Four of the nine scientists named by U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz as recipients of the 2014 Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award, the Department of Energy (DOE)’s highest scientific honor, are affiliated with Berkeley Lab. Three hold senior scientist appointments with the Lab and a fourth is conducting research here as a guest.
David Schlegel is an astrophysicist with Berkeley Lab’s Physics Division, who serves as the Principal Investigator for the BOSS project on the Sloan Telescope, the Co-Principal Investigator for the DECals sky survey, and the Project Scientist for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). He was recognized for his “exceptional leadership of major projects making the largest two-dimensional and three-dimensional maps of the universe, which have been used to map the expansion rate of the Universe to 10 billion light years and beyond, and helped ascertain the nature of Dark Energy, test General Relativity, and positively impact fundamental understanding of matter and energy in the universe.”
Peidong Yang is a faculty chemist who holds joint appointments with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division, the University of California (UC) Berkeley, where he holds the S.K. and Angela Chan Distinguished Professor of Energy chair, and the Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute (Kavli-ENSI), for which he is a co-director. He was recognized for his “seminal research advancing the synthesis and understanding of nanoscale materials, including semiconductor nanowires and metal nanocrystals, and their impact to structures and devices for applications in nanophotonics, nanoelectronics, and energy conversion.”
Carolyn Bertozzi is also a faculty chemist with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division who is the T.Z. and Irmgard Chu Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley, and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She was recognized for her “significant scientific research contributions at the interface of chemistry, biology and nanoscience, including major advances in the chemistry and biology of complex carbohydrates, including the development of nanotechnologies and chemistries for probing biological systems, optimizing bioreactors, and innovating tailored devices and materials.”
Jizhong (Joe) Zhou is a Presidential Professor in the Department of Botany and Microbiology and Director of the Institute for Environmental Genomics at the University of Oklahoma. He is also a guest researcher with Berkeley Lab’s Earth Sciences Division, and a principal investigator for ENIGMA (Ecosystems and Networks Integrated with Genes and Molecular Assemblies), DOE Scientific Focus Area grant program and managed by Berkeley Lab. Zhou was recognized for his “outstanding accomplishments in environmental genomics and microbial ecology, including the development of innovative metagenomics technologies for environmental sciences, for groundbreaking discoveries to understand the feedbacks, mechanisms, and fundamental principles of microbial systems in response to environmental change, and for transformative leadership to elucidate microbial ecological networks and to link microbial biodiversity with ecosystem functions.”
DOE’s E.O. Lawrence Awards were established by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1959, to honor Ernest Lawrence, the Nobel Prize-winning inventor of the cyclotron, the forerunner of today’s particle accelerators, and the founder and namesake of Berkeley Lab. This year’s nine Lawrence Award recipients will receive a medal and a $20,000 honorarium at a ceremony in Washington, D.C., later this year.
Additional Information
To learn more about DOE’s E.O. Lawrence Award and the contributions of each award recipient go here