 Martin J. Buerger Award to Michael James
The 2009 Buerger Award, which recognizes mature scientists who have made contributions of exceptional distinction in areas of interest to the ACA will be presented to Michael James, Professor, University of Alberta, at the 2009 ACA Meeting in Toronto.
 Warren Diffraction Physics Award to Shih-Lin Chang
Shih-Lin Chang, Professor, Department of Physics, National Tsing Hua University will receive the Bertran E. Warren Diffraction Physics Award, which recognizes an important recent contribution to the physics of solids or liquids using x-ray, neutron, or electron diffraction techniques at the 2009 ACA Meeting in Toronto.
Special Smposia will be organized in honor of the Buerger and Warren awardees, at which they will deliver the keynote lectures. The full citations, and background information for both awardees will appear in the Winter issue of ACA RefleXions.
 Etter Early Career Award to Svilen Bobev
Svilen Bobev will be presented with the award and will give the keynote lecture at a symposium organized in his honor at the ACA Annual Meeting in Toronto next July. Svilen is an enormously talented and extraordinarily productive crystallographer and solid state chemist. He joined the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at U.Delaware in 2004 as a tenure-track Assistant Professor; he had previously worked at LANL for two years as an independent Director’s Award Postdoctoral Fellow. A native of Bulgaria, he received his Ph.D. from Notre Dame in 2002 working with Slavi Sevov. Svilen’ s research addresses important issues concerning the relationships between the composition, structure, and electronic structure of complex intermetallic compounds and their properties. He conducts detailed experimental studies on new magnetic materials based on the Rare-Earth elements (RE) and the heavier carbon analogues, Si, Ge and Sn. These metals from the lanthanide family have many scientific and industrial uses as catalysts, phosphors, lasers, hydrogen storage materials, and most importantly - as superior performance magnets for applications in magnetic bearings, switches, and DC motors. The unique magnetic/electronic properties in in RE-Si and RE-Ge systems inspire Svilen in his efforts to understand electron and spin interactions; characterization of the relevant compounds by x-ray diffraction is fundamental to this undertaking.
Since his arrival in Delaware Svilen has quickly built a functioning laboratory and assembled a highly productive research group: one postdoctoral fellow, two graduate students, and a variable but substantial number of undergraduate researchers. Under Svilen’s leadership this relatively small group has proven extraordinarily productive. He has published 53(!) papers describing research results from his Delaware lab already, which, together with the 33 papers resulting from his previous work, constitutes a remarkable body of work for someone so early in his career. Svilen’s contributions have been recognized by an ACS-PRF grant award, and an NSF Career Award in support of his work.
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