By David Brand
Two scientific symposia will be held on campus in coming weeks, one organized as a memorial tribute and the other as a 65th birthday celebration.
The memorial symposium, on June 26, will be held by the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology to honor the late Andreas C. Albrecht, who was professor of chemistry at Cornell when he died Sept. 26, 2002. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Washington and came to Cornell as an instructor in 1956, becoming an assistant professor a year later. He was named a full professor in 1965.
Albrecht is most widely known for his contributions to the science of photochemistry, and particularly his theoretical and experimental advances in resonance Raman spectroscopy of biologically important molecules. In 1971 he formulated his theory of preresonance Raman dispersion, which today is routinely and widely used in analyzing a variety of materials.
The symposium, in 119 Baker Laboratory, will feature Albrecht's colleagues and co-workers.
The birthday tribute, on July 3, will be for James W. York, a Cornell professor of physics, who theorizes about universal time, space and gravity. The symposium, organized by the Departments of Physics and Astronomy, is also to commemorate York's contributions to general relativity.
York came to the Cornell campus in January 2002 from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (UNC), where he had been Inter-Institutional Distinguished Professor of Physics since 2001 and the Agnew Hunter Bahnson Jr. Distinguished Professor of Physics since 1989. He first joined the UNC faculty in 1973 as an associate professor. He has been an assistant professor at North Carolina State University (NCSU) and a lecturer and assistant professor at Princeton University. He also has been a visiting professor at the Universite de Paris VI, the University of Texas and the University of Maryland. He obtained his B.S. in 1962 and his Ph.D. in 1966, both from NCSU.
In 2002 he was awarded the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics by the American Physical Society and the American Institute of Physics. The prize is regarded as one of the world's major scientific awards, and at least six Nobel Prize winners are among previous recipients.
The birthday symposium, held in Clark Hall, will include speakers in the fields of geometrodynamics, the initial-value problem of general relativity, numerical relativity, quantum and semi-classical gravity and gravitational thermodynamics. The conference is open to the Cornell community. More information is available at http://www.astro.cornell.edu/events.
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