Physics SlideShow

Leggett and Woese to receive Distinguished Service Medallion

Sir Anthony J. Leggett, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor and Center for Advanced Study Professor of Physics, will be presented the Trustees' Distinguished Service Medallion. Also being honored are Carl R. Woese, Stanley O. Ikenberry Endowed Chair and Center for Advanced Study Professor of Microbiology, and the late Paul C. Lauterbur.

The Trustees' Distinguished Service Medallion was created to recognize individuals whose contribution to the growth and development of the University of Illinois, through extraordinary service or benefaction, has been of unusual significance.

Board of Trustees Chairman Niranjan S. Shah said that the three faculty members were richly deserving of the board's highest award. "These three legendary University of Illinois faculty members have garnered many national and international honors for their research," Shah said. "It is fitting that we add our institutional laurels signifying the University's appreciation and profound respect for three of our great researchers and their monumental scientific advances."

Leggett was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics with Alexei Abrikosov and Vitaly Ginzburg for studies in superconductivity and superfluidity that advanced the field of quantum mechanics and the understanding of the behaviors of subatomic structures. He currently serves as chief scientist for the Institute for Condensed Matter Theory at Illinois.

Leggett, who joined the U of I faculty in 1983, is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Russian Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society (UK), the American Physical Society, the American Institute of Physics, and an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Physics (UK). He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2004 "for services to physics."

A native of London, Leggett earned his doctorate in physics from Oxford University. He worked at the U of I as a postdoctoral research associate from 1964 to 1965 and again in 1967, before returning to join the U of I faculty in 1983.

Carl Woese, originally trained as a physicist, also has an appointment in the Department of Physics at Illinois. He received the 2003 Crafoord Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for his discovery of the third domain of life, the Archaea. Woese was a MacArthur Fellow in 1984, was made a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1988, received the Leeuwenhoek Medal, microbiology's highest honor, in 1992, and was a National Medal of Science recipient in 2000. In 2006, he was made a foreign member of the Royal Society.