Giacinto Scoles,
the Donner Professor of Science and professor of chemistry at
Princeton, has been named a recipient of the 2006 Benjamin Franklin
Medal in Physics.
He shares the prize, which will be presented at an April 27 ceremony in
Philadelphia, with J. Peter Toennies, associate professor of physics at
the University of Göttingen in Germany.
The two were cited for their "development of new techniques for
studying molecules, including unstable species that could not be
examined otherwise, by embedding them in extremely small and ultra-cold
droplets of helium. Their work also led to a better understanding of
the extraordinary properties of superfluid helium, such as its ability
to flow without friction."
The Franklin Institute Awards are among the oldest and most prestigious
comprehensive science awards in the world. They are intended to
recognize individuals whose innovation has benefited humanity, advanced
science, launched new fields of inquiry and deepened the understanding
of the universe.
Scoles joined the Princeton chemistry department
in 1987 after teaching at the University of Genova and the University
of Trento in Italy, the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and the
University of Waterloo in Canada. He also is affiliated with the Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials.
He teaches part time at the International School for Advanced Studies
in Trieste, Italy, and is a long-term collaborator at the Elettra
Synchrotron Laboratory in Trieste.
Scoles is an elected fellow of the Royal Society of the United Kingdom
and an elected foreign member of the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences
of the Netherlands. He received the Lippincott Award of the Optical
Society of America, the Coblentz Society and the Society for Applied
Spectroscopy in 1995, and earned the American Physical Society's E.K.
Plyler Prize for Molecular Spectroscopy in 2003.
