KNAW chooses 16 new members
The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) has elected 16 new members. Three of the new members are physicists: Marileen Dogterom, Frank Linde and the foreign astronomer Shrinivas Kulkarni. Members of the KNAW, prominent scientists from all disciplines, are elected on the basis of nominations from peers within and outside of the Academy. The KNAW has about 500 members. Membership is for life. On Monday 12 September 2016 the new Academy members will be installed at the Trippenhuis building of the KNAW.
The elected physicists are:
Marileen Dogterom
Professor of Bionanoscience at Delft University of Technology and Professor of Biophysics at Leiden University
Marileen Dogterom is one of the pioneers in the discipline of biomolecular physics. Her research focuses on the cytoskeleton: the microtubules that give the cells of plants and animals their shape and mechanical function and that make it possible for cells to divide so successfully. In her lab Dogterom simulates the construction of parts of cells in a controlled environment to gain a quantitative understanding of how the cytoskeleton works. Her work lays an important foundation for the development of artificial cells.
Frank Linde
Professor of Experimental High-Energy Physics at the University of Amsterdam
Frank Linde is one of the most prominent scientists in the Netherlands in the area of high-energy physics – elementary particle physics. He made an important contribution to the search for new particles and the determination of their characteristics. Linde's contributions to the design and construction of the hypersensitive ATLAS detector at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider are widely recognised. The ATLAS detector is one of two instruments with which the Higgs particle was finally discovered in 2012. In addition, Linde has actively made efforts to strengthen astroparticle physics research in the Netherlands by involving 'his' institute – Nikhef – in the efforts to directly detect gravitational waves (Virgo experiment) and the enigmatic dark matter (XENON experiment). Linde was recently appointed as chair of the Astroparticle Physics European Consortium.
Appointed as foreign member:
Shrinivas Kulkarni
Professor of Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, United States
Shrinivas Kulkarni has a large number of astrophysics discoveries to his name. In 1982 he discovered the millisecond radio pulses: a new class of neutron stars that rotate around their axis several hundreds of times per second. More recently he was one of the founders of research into optical variable sources (transients) with which he has discovered many new types of objects such as superluminous supernovae. Twenty years ago he built the largest part of the first 'pulsar machine' for the Westerbork Radio Telescope with which the successful Dutch pulsar research started.
The complete list of new members can be found on the KNAW website.