PASADENA, Calif.—Five graduates of the California Institute of Technology will be honored as distinguished alumni during the general session at Seminar Day, May 19, as part of the annual Seminar Day and Reunion Weekend.
This year's new distinguished alumni are France Córdova, chancellor of UC Riverside who earlier this week was named Purdue University president; Francis A. Dahlen, chairman of the department of geosciences at Princeton University; Ronald W. Davis, professor of biochemistry and genetics and director of the Genome Technology Center at Stanford University; Benjamin M. Rosen, chairman emeritus of Compaq Computer Corporation; and Peter W. Shor, professor of applied mathematics at MIT.
Córdova earned her doctorate in physics at Caltech in 1979. A nationally recognized astrophysicist, she worked as a staff scientist with the space astronomy and astrophysics group at the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1979 to 1989, where she also served as deputy group leader. She headed the department of astronomy and astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University from 1989 to 1993, and served as chief scientist at NASA from 1993 to 1996. She was professor of physics and vice chancellor for research at UC Santa Barbara from 1996 until she became chancellor of UC Riverside in 2002. Córdova's research has focused on observational and experimental astrophysics, X-ray and gamma-ray sources, and spaceborne instrumentation.
Dahlen earned his bachelor of science degree from Caltech in 1964. A fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Geophysical Union (AGU) as well as a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Dahlen is widely considered to be the most outstanding theoretical seismologist in the world today. He joined Princeton University's department of geological and geophysical sciences in 1970, becoming chair of the department of geosciences in 2001. His research interests include theoretical global seismology, free oscillations of aspherical, anelastic, and anisotropic Earth models, seismic wave propagation in heterogeneous media, mode-ray duality, mechanics of earthquake sources, Earth's rotation, and the mechanics and thermodynamics of brittle friction mountain building.
Davis earned his doctorate in chemistry in 1970. He is known for his advances in the analysis of whole genomes, advances that have provided complete sequences for several organisms, including substantial parts of the human genome. He has also played a key role in the early development of recombinant DNA methods and the extension of those methods into the study of yeast and higher eukaryotes. His many honors include the 2005 Dickson Prize in Medicine, the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine's most prestigious award; the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Genetics Society; the Herbert A. Sober Award; and the Genetics Society of America Award. He joined Stanford's department of biochemistry in 1972, was appointed director of the Stanford Genome Technology Center in 1994, and served in the senate of the Stanford University School of Medicine Faculty Council from 2000 to 2002.
Rosen received his bachelor of science in electrical engineering in 1954. Chairman emeritus of the Caltech Board of Trustees, he is also a cofounder of Sevin Rosen Funds, a venture-capital firm that has invested in dozens of start-up technology companies that have grown to represent a collective market value in excess of a hundred billion dollars. He was also a principal investor in Lotus Development Corporation. Prior to forming Sevin Rosen, he served as vice president and senior electronics analyst at Morgan Stanley & Co., and during the 1950s he worked as an electronics engineer at Raytheon and Sperry Gyroscope. He served as chairman of Compaq, in which he was also a principal investor, from 1983 to 2000, and of the Caltech Board from 2001 to 2004.
Shor earned a bachelor of science in mathematics from Caltech in 1981. Famous for his work on quantum computation, and particularly for Shor's algorithm, which permits numbers to be factored exponentially faster than with the best available algorithm that can be run on a classical computer, Shor is currently professor of applied mathematics at MIT. He is also affiliated with MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Center for Theoretical Physics. His honors include the 1998 Rolf Nevanlinna Prize, awarded at the 1998 International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin; sponsored by the University of Helsinki, the prize recognizes the work of young mathematicians in the mathematical aspects of information science. In 1999 he won a MacArthur Fellowship and the Gödel Prize for outstanding journal article in the area of theoretical computer science.
The Distinguished Alumni Award is the highest honor the Institute bestows upon a graduate, and is in recognition of "a particular achievement of noteworthy value, a series of such achievements, or a career of noteworthy accomplishment." Selections are made by a committee comprising the president, provost, faculty, and alumni members, and confirmed by the Caltech Board of Trustees.
