The Franklin Institute just lately introduced its 2024 cohort of award winners, as a part of its bicentennial celebration. Since its inception, the Franklin Institute Awards Program has honored essentially the most influential scientists, engineers, and inventors who’ve considerably superior science and expertise. It is among the oldest complete science awards on this planet.
The 2024 honorees embrace Institute Professor and Vice Provost for School Paula T. Hammond ’84 PhD ’93; Affiliate Professor Gabriela S. Schlau-Cohen; Analysis Affiliate Robert Metcalfe ’69; Mary Boyce SM ’84, PhD ’87; and Lisa Su ’90, SM ’91, PhD ’94. All 2024 Franklin Institute Award Laureates might be celebrated in a ceremony on April 18 on the Benjamin Franklin Nationwide Memorial of the Franklin Institute.
Paula Hammond was awarded the 2024 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Chemistry, one of many oldest complete science awards on this planet. The award cites her “revolutionary strategies to create novel supplies one molecular layer at a time and for making use of these supplies to areas starting from drug supply to power storage.” Hammond’s methods for creating skinny polymer movies and different supplies utilizing layer-by-layer meeting is groundbreaking. They can be utilized to construct polymers with extremely managed architectures by alternately exposing a floor to positively and negatively charged particles. Supplies can then be designed for a lot of completely different purposes, together with drug supply, regenerative drugs, noninvasive imaging, and battery applied sciences. Hammond is the recipient of MIT’s 2023-24 Killian Award and, in 2021, was named an Institute Professor, MIT’s highest school honor. Hammond is one in every of solely 25 individuals who have been elected to all three U.S. Nationwide Academies — Engineering, Science, and Drugs.
Gabriela Schlau-Cohen earned the Benjamin Franklin NextGen Award for “illuminating the basic chemical processes that shield vegetation from solar injury, uncovering novel approaches to rising crop yields.” Schlau-Cohen combines instruments from chemistry, optics, biology, and microscopy to develop new approaches to probe dynamics. Her group focuses on dynamics in membrane proteins, notably photosynthetic light-harvesting techniques which are of curiosity for sustainable power purposes. Following a postdoc at Stanford College, Schlau-Cohen joined the Division of Chemistry school in 2015. She earned a bachelor’s diploma in chemical physics from Brown College in 2003 adopted by a PhD in chemistry on the College of California at Berkeley.
Robert Metcalfe ’69, a analysis affiliate of the MIT Laptop Science and Synthetic Intelligence Laboratory and MIT Company life member emeritus, received the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering for “his pioneering position within the design, improvement, and commercialization of Ethernet, an interface for networking and file sharing between computer systems.” MetCalfe is a graduate of MIT’s Division of Electrical Engineering and Laptop Science (EECS) and is a former president of the MIT Alumni Affiliation.
Mary Boyce SM ’84, PhD ’87 received the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Mechanical Engineering for “transformative contributions to our understanding of the bodily conduct of polymers, supplies made from lengthy chains of molecules, resulting in revolutionary product improvement of rubber and different comfortable supplies.” A longtime MIT school member and former head of MIT’s Division of Mechanical Engineering, Boyce is at the moment a professor of mechanical engineering and provost emerita of Columbia College.
Lisa Su ’90, SM ’91, PhD ’94, a graduate of MIT’s Division of EECS and the present president, CEO, and chair of AMD, received the Bower Award for Enterprise Management for “her transformational management of AMD, a pacesetter in high-performance and adaptive computing and one of many quickest rising semiconductor firms on this planet.”
