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Deborah
S. Jin
© Geoffrey Wheeler
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WASHINGTON,
D.C. — Deborah S. Jin, a physicist and fellow of the
U.S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards
and Technology (NIST), has been elected as one of 72 new members
to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Jin is a fellow
at JILA, a physics research institute jointly operated by
NIST and the University of Colorado (CU), and is also an associate
adjoint professor at CU-Boulder.
Election
to membership in the academy is considered one of the highest
honors that can be accorded a U.S. scientist or engineer.
Members are elected by current members in recognition of their
distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.
Jin,
36, joins Susan Solomon of the Commerce Department's National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as the youngest woman
to be elected to the academy.
The
NAS election was held May 3, 2005, during the business session
of the 142nd annual meeting of the academy. The current total
number of active members is 1,976. (For a link to the press
release with the full list of new members, see
http://national-academies.org/.)
Jin
leads a team of physicists at JILA that reported in January
2004 the
first observation of a “fermionic condensate”
formed from pairs of atoms in an ultracold gas, a long-sought,
novel form of matter. Physicists hope that further research
with such condensates eventually will help unlock the mysteries
of high-temperature superconductivity, a phenomenon with the
potential to improve energy efficiency dramatically across
a broad range of applications.
In October
2003, Jin won a $500,000 MacArthur
Fellowship, commonly known as a "genius grant."
As a
non-regulatory agency, NIST develops and promotes measurement,
standards and technology to enhance productivity, facilitate
trade and improve the quality of life.
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