Awards

The American Cancer Society (ACS) awards the 2020 Medal of Honor to three doctors. The Medal of Honor is the most prestigious award bestowed to distinguished individuals or foundations who have made valuable contributions in the categories of basic research, cancer control, clinical research, and philanthropy.

A team of researchers from the Data Science Institute at Columbia University has received the Facebook Systems for Machine Learning Award for their research exploring how to co-train machine learning models for better decision-making.

The 2020 Julius Springer Prize for Applied Physics will be awarded to Leon O. Chua, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley in the US. Chua's work spans fields from nanoelectronics to nonlinear circuits and systems, robotics and computational biology, and over his long career his papers have been cited around 80,000 times.

The idea of using principles from biology as a theoretical framework for social psychologists to understand societal differences has won the 2019 Daniel M. Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. Scientists from Arizona State University and the University of California, Irvine, used adaptive phenotypic plasticity, or how the environment of a living thing affects development and behavior, as a model for how people act in different societies.

Leonard Kleinrock, distinguished professor of computer science and one of the world's foremost internet pioneers, was awarded the UCLA Medal, the campus's highest honor, for his remarkable contributions in providing the intellectual foundation for the modern technical age.

The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Information and Communications Technology category has gone in this twelfth edition to Isabelle Guyon, Bernhard Schölkopf and Vladimir Vapnik, for their 'fundamental contributions to machine learning,' in the words of the committee. The methods they developed in artificial intelligence are 'transforming the everyday world, improving fields as diverse as medical diagnosis, computer vision, natural language processing and the monitoring of climate change.'

The Pezcoller Foundation-AACR International Award for Extraordinary Achievement in Cancer Research will be presented to John E. Dick, PhD, Fellow of the AACR Academy, at the AACR Annual Meeting 2020, to be held April 24-29 in San Diego.

The ATS Foundation Research Program/Pulmonary Hypertension Association has awarded Rahul Kumar, PhD, of the University of California, San Francisco, a $80,000 Foundation Partner grant. A $50,000 Foundation Partner grant was awarded to Jason Boehme, MD, also of the University of California, San Francisco. Ke Yuan, PhD, of Boston Children's Hospital is the 2019 recipient of the Aldrighetti Research Award for Young Investigators.

The American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) is pleased to announce that Corinn Rutkoski and Renee Collini have been selected as the 2020 AIBS Emerging Public Policy Leadership Award (EPPLA) recipients. The EPPLA recognizes graduate students in the biological sciences who have demonstrated leadership skills and an aptitude for future professional success working at the intersection of science and public policy.