2007 Wood Award to Lisa Randall

Lisa Randall, Professor of Theoretical Physics at Harvard University, will receive the Elizabeth A. Wood Award at the 2007 ACA Meeting in Salt Lake City next July. The award was established in 1997 to honor the late Betty Wood, (For her obituary and remembrances of Betty see the Spring 2006 ACA RefleXions, p 19 and the the article that follows this) Betty was the author of Crystals and Light, and Science From Your Airplane Window.The Wood Award is given to those who excel in bringing science to the attention of a wider audience.

Lisa’s book Warped Passages:  Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions, (HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 2005), has received high praise from critics. Tim Folger, editor of Best American Science and Nature Writing, says that Warped Passages “gives an engaging and remarkably clear account of how the existence of dimensions beyond the familiar three (or four, if you include time) may resolve a host of cosmic quandaries. The discovery of extra dimensions - and Randall believes there’s at least a fair chance that evidence for them might be found within the next few years - would utterly transform our view of the universe.”

Lisa was the first tenured woman in the Princeton physics department and the first tenured woman theoretical physicist at MIT and Harvard. She is the winner of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship and a National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award. In 2006, she received the Klopsted Award from the American Society of Physics Teachers and she was featured in Newsweek’s “Who’s Next in 2006” issue. Her research at Harvard concerns the fundamental nature of particles and forces and the relationships among matter’s most basic elements. She has worked on a wide variety of models and theories, the most recent of which involve extra dimensions of space. She has also worked on supersymmetry, Standard Model observables, cosmological inflation, baryogenesis, grand unified theories, and aspects of string theory. She has made seminal contributions in all these areas and in autumn, 2004, she was the most cited theoretical physicist of the previous five years.