Faculty Award Recipients in the News

Emi Nakamura, a UC Berkeley economist, is this year’s recipient of the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal , widely viewed as second only in prestige to the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. The annual award, announced by the American Economic Association, is given to an American economist under age 40 who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge.

In recognition of their outstanding achievements in original research, eight UC Berkeley faculty have been elected members of the National Academy of Sciences, one of the most distinguished scientific organizations in the country. The newly elected researchers include a neuroscientist, two physicists, two cellular biologists, a computer scientist, a chemist and an economist, and bring the total number of living UC Berkeley faculty who are members of the academy to 135.

The Royal Society of London, the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence, announced their newest fellows this week, among them four UC Berkeley faculty. The newest Berkeley fellows are U.K.-born developmental biologist Richard Harland and Australian-born chemist Martin Head-Gordon. They are joined by two new foreign members, climate scientist Inez Fung and plant biologist Brian Staskawicz. The four are among 51 new fellows, 10 new foreign members and one new honorary member.

Seven assistant professors from the fields of astronomy, biology, computer science, economics and statistics have been named 2019 Sloan Research Fellows. They are among 126 scholars from the United States and Canada whose early-career achievements mark them as being among today’s very best scientific minds. Winners receive $70,000 over the course of two years toward a research project.

Claire Tomlin, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and Douglas Clark, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and dean of the College of Chemistry, are among 86 newly elected members of the prestigious National Academy of Engineering.

David Zilberman, a professor of agricultural and resource economics at UC Berkeley, has been awarded the 2019 Wolf Prize in Agriculture in recognition of his work developing economic models for fundamental problems in agriculture, economics, and policy.

Two UC Berkeley faculty have been awarded 2019 Wolf Prizes in chemistry and agriculture, the Israel-based Wolf Foundation announced this week.

John F. Hartwig from University of California at Berkeley and Stephen L. Buchwald from MIT, awarded the 2019 Wolf Prize for Chemistry for the development of efficient transition-metal catalysts that have revolutionized drug manufacturing, leading to a breakthrough in molecule and synthetics design. 

Daniel Weisz, an assistant professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley, was honored at this week’s meeting of the American Astronomical Society for his early-career research on relatively nearby “dwarf” galaxies using the Hubble Space Telescope.

A “bumper crop” of prestigious awards, prizes and honors will be presented Wednesday, Jan. 3 in Chicago to UC Berkeley faculty members by the American Historical Association, the nation’s most important professional association for historians.

Just when William Blake was out of Amanda Goldstein’s life, he came stomping back in a most unexpected way.The book the Berkeley associate professor had written about the melding of poetry and science centuries past, Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life, had been out of her mind for the better part of a year. Then, not long ago came an email telling her that she’d won the Modern Language Association’s 25th annual Prize for a First Book.

Electrical engineering and computer sciences professor Connie Chang-Hasnain has been named a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), an organization that champions the societal benefits of university research.