April 28, 2010 - SLAC Scientists Elected to National Academy of Sciences
Director and theorist honored for lifetime of achievement

Menlo Park, Calif.—Persis Drell and Steven Kivelson have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, joining 70 other new members and 18 foreign associates in the prestigious group. Drell is Director of the US Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Professor of Particle Physics and Astrophysics at Stanford University. Steven Kivelson is a Member of the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences, or SIMES, a joint institute of SLAC and Stanford, and is a Professor of Physics at Stanford.

Drell responded to the election saying, "This was a very nice surprise and I am honored by the recognition."

Kivelson said, "It's an honor and it feels great." He joked, "You know, I'm probably the first member of the Academy to have been informed of his election by his mother." Kivelson's mother Margaret Kivelson is an Academy member herself and a prominent space physicist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Drell's scientific career has included work on fundamental properties of particle physics, such as the nonconservation of parity in weak interactions, and particle astrophysics with the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, on which she is a collaborator.

Kivelson is a condensed matter theorist working on understanding the connections between the microscopic properties of electrons and molecules with the macroscopic and collective properties of materials. These include topics such as high-temperature superconductivity, quantum magnetism, quantum Hall effects, and electronic liquid crystalline phases of matter.

About Persis Drell

Drell became the fourth director of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in 2007, having spent the years since 2002 in various senior scientific management roles at SLAC. Prior to SLAC, she was the Deputy Director of the Cornell Laboratory for Nuclear Studies and a Professor of Physics at Cornell University. Drell is also a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Drell earned her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1983, and her AB in Math/Physics with Honors from Wellesley College in 1977.

About Steven Kivelson

Kivelson has been a Professor of Physics at Stanford since 2004. He was previously a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles. He earned his PhD from Harvard University in 1979. Kivelson has also held appointments and fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania, University of California, Santa Barbara, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Rutgers University.

Further information about the National Academy of Sciences and other elected members is available on the National Academy of Sciences Web site.

SLAC is a multi-program laboratory exploring frontier questions in photon science, astrophysics, particle physics and accelerator research. Located in Menlo Park, California, SLAC is operated by Stanford University for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science.

-30-