Leo Radzihovsky, a 32-year-old assistant professor of physics at the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ at Boulder, has won a prestigious and highly competitive $625,000 Packard Fellowship.
Radzihovsky and 23 other recipients were cited by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation as among "the most promising science and engineering researchers at universities in the United States." Other 1998 recipients included young faculty members at institutions including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Cal Tech, MIT and the universities of California and Chicago.
Radzihovsky was the only recipient in the state of Colorado. He becomes the seventh CU-Boulder professor to receive the fellowship.
The fellowship provides each faculty member with an unrestricted grant of $125,000 per year for five years to support his or her scientific research. The fellowships are designed to enable young scientists and engineers to pursue research that may be considered too risky for standard sources of funding.
Radzihovsky's research interests are in theoretical condensed matter physics, specializing in superconductivity, liquid crystals, phase transitions and disordered systems. He teaches undergraduate and graduate classes and includes undergraduate students in his research.
Radzihovsky has taught at CU-Boulder since 1995. He was awarded a prestigious $35,000 Sloan Research Fellowship in 1997 and $200,000 CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation in 1996. His wife, Lucy Pao, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, also received a $200,000 CAREER grant in 1996.
Radzihovsky was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and emigrated to the United States with his family in 1980. He earned a bachelor's and a master's degree in four years from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., where he was valedictorian, and then a master's and doctorate in physics from Harvard. He held a perfect grade-point average of 4.0 while earning all four of his college degrees.
He has received several other awards including the 1988 Apker National Award for the best undergraduate physics research in the country.
Prior to joining CU-Boulder, Radzihovsky was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago and worked at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories and AT&T Bell Laboratories. The physics department is part of CU-Boulder's College of Arts and Sciences.
Since 1988, the Packard Foundation has awarded fellowships worth $125 million to 224 faculty members at universities in the United States. Packard Fellowships are the largest non-government program providing unrestricted grants to young university faculty in science and engineering.
The 1998 fellows were nominated by their university presidents and recommended by a panel of nationally recognized scientists and engineers.
The Packard Foundation, a private family foundation based in Los Altos, Calif., provides funding for nonprofit organizations in the areas of science, population, conservation, and children, family and communities.