September 22, 2005

Faculty Honors

David N. Seidman, Walter P. Murphy Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, is the recipient of two honors from ASM International.

He will receive the award of Fellow at the ASM International meeting Sept. 26 and the Albert Sauveur Achievement Award at the ASM International meeting in October 2006.

ASM Fellows are elected for “distinguished contributions to materials science and engineering”; the citation for his Fellow award reads “for pioneering applications of field-ion, atom-probe and three-dimensional atom-probe microscopies in physical metallurgy.”

The Albert Sauveur Achievement Award is given to individuals who have made “pioneering materials science and engineering achievements that stimulated organized work to an extent that a marked basic advance has been made in materials science and engineering knowledge.”

The citation for this award reads, “For seminal and sustained applications of field-ion and atom-probe microscopies to numerous fundamental and technologically important problems in physical metallurgy and materials science over a thirty-year period.”

Seidman’s research focuses on understanding the atomistic mechanisms for the temporal evolution of the nano- and mesoscopic structures of technologically important alloys for use at elevated temperatures (nickel-, aluminum-, and titanium-based alloys), both experimentally and via atomistic computer simulations. He is also involved in the development of an explosion resistant high-strength low-alloy steel, which is precipitation strengthened, for the Office of Naval Research.

Seidman is also pursuing the question of the three-dimensional distributions of dopants in silicon at an atomic scale. His research involves the use of a unique instrument, the local-electrode atom-probe (LEAP) tomograph, which provides chemical compositional information on a subnanoscale in three-dimensions.

Seidman was twice chosen as a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow, was an Alexander von Humboldt Senior Fellow at Institut für Metallphysik der Universität Göttingen, and received a Max Planck Research Prize of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft and the Alexander Von Humboldt Stiftung.

He is also a Fellow of the TMS (Minerals•Metals•Materials) and the American Physical Society (Division of Condensed Matter Physics), and was awarded the Robert Lansing Hardy Gold Medal of the former society. Seidman is currently an editor of the Journal of Materials Science, was editor-in-chief of Interface Science, and has edited many special issues of proceedings of scientific meetings in addition to numerous scientific publications.

He has had extensive stays at institutions in France, Germany, Israel and the United States. Seidman is founder and director of the Center for Atom-Probe Tomography, a central facility of the National Science Foundation Funded Materials Research Center.

Kathleen Thelen, Payson S. Wild Professor of Political Science, has been honored with the prestigious 2005 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award of the American Political Science Association for “the best book on government, politics, or international affairs.”

The award is for her book, “How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States and Japan” (Cambridge University Press 2004). The annual award has been given to some of the leading figures in political science. It is sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation at Princeton University and has a cash prize of $5,000.

Thelen last year received the Max Planck Research Award for Humanities and Social Sciences presented by the Max Planck Society in cooperation with the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She is also a Permanent External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany, and Appointed Affiliated Visiting Professor at the International Center for Business and Politics at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark.

A fellow of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern and chair of the executive committee of the Council for European Studies based at Columbia University, Thelen’s studies include the origins, development, and effects of institutional arrangements that define distinctive “varieties of capitalism” across the developed democracies. Thelen is currently working on a comparative examination of contemporary changes in labor market institutions in the developed democracies.

She is the author of “Beyond Continuity: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies” (edited with Wolfgang Streeck, Oxford University Press, 2005).  Her articles have appeared in World Politics, Governance, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Comparative Politics, Studies in American Political Development, Politics & Society, Journal of Japanese Studies among others.

Thelen has received awards and fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (Scheduled Fellow), Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin), Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas in Mexico City, Society for Comparative Research at Yale, National Science Foundation, Science Center in Berlin (Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung), Robert Bosch Foundation, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, American-Scandinavian Foundation, and Friedrich Ebert Foundation among others.

Thelen has served as a member of the executive boards of the American Political Science Association’s organized sections in Comparative Politics, European Politics and Society, and Qualitative Methods. She is also an appointed member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Social Science Research Center of Berlin (Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung).