Princeton University

People

Spotlight

Name: Lynn Kratzer.

Position: Office assistant in the Department of History. Working with Judy Hanson, the department manager, to help run the office. Assisting new faculty members in getting settled. Cataloging senior theses. Assembling the department directory and coordinating all special classroom scheduling and equipment needs.

Quote: “In my previous position, I spent more than 30 years in a very stressful and intense corporate environment. My current position is challenging and rewarding, and a whole lot more fun. I enjoy interacting with both students and faculty. I’m grateful for the meaningful friendships I have formed with my fellow office colleagues.”

Other interests: Visiting folk art and antique shows to add to her collection of china egg cups, which she has amassed over the last 35 years. Researching and reproducing antique needlework and hooked rug designs. Raising foster kittens. Spending time with her husband, Sam, and their children, Tori and Todd.

Briefs

Peter and Rosemary Grant of Princeton’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology have been selected to receive the Balzan Prize for their work in population biology.

The International Balzan Foundation annually awards four prizes for scientific and academic excellence. Each prize is valued at 1 million Swiss francs (about $800,000), and winners are expected to earmark half of the money for future projects to be carried out by young researchers. The award ceremony will take place on Friday, Nov. 11, in the Swiss Houses of Parliament in Bern.

The Grants were selected for “their remarkable long-term studies demonstrating evolution in action in Galapagos finches,” according to the foundation. “The work of the Grants has had a seminal influence in the fields of population biology, evolution and ecology. It is generally regarded as the most significant study of evolutionary change in the field that has been carried out in the last 30 years.”

Peter Grant is the Class of 1877 Professor of Zoology and Rosemary Grant is a senior research biologist at Princeton. For three decades, the married couple have traveled to the Galapagos Islands off the coast of South America to study the various species of finch that influenced Charles Darwin when formulating his theory of evolution. The Grants conduct research on how the finches have changed as a result of dramatic climatic differences.

Both are interested in the interplay of genetics, ecology and behavior, and especially in the question of why and when one species separates into two. In 1991, their joint publication, “Evolutionary Dynamics of a Natural Population: The Large Cactus Finch of the Galapagos,” earned the Wildlife Publication Award of the Wildlife Society. They also received the E.O. Wilson Prize of the American Society of Naturalists in 1998, the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society of London in 2002 and the Grinnell Award of the University of California-Berkeley in 2003.

The Grants are members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the General Assembly of the Charles Darwin Foundation.

Since 1961, 106 scientists, scholars, artists and institutions have been honored with the Balzan Prize, including Mother Teresa, the Nobel Foundation and Paul Hindemith. Previous Princeton winners include Charles Gillispie, the Dayton Stockton Professor of History Emeritus, and Anthony Grafton, the Henry Putnam University Professor of History.

Professor Hisashi Kobayashi has been selected to receive the 2005 Technology Award of the Eduard Rhein Foundation for his role in inventing techniques that allowed dramatic increases in the storage capacity of computer hard disks.

Kobayashi, who is the Sherman Fairchild University Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, will share the award with François Dolivo and Evangelos Eleftheriou of the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory.

The Rhein Foundation will present the award, which is one of the highest honors in the field of information technology, at a ceremony to be held at the Deutsch Museum in Munich, Germany, on Oct. 15.

The award honors Kobayashi for the conception and analysis of a data storage technique now known as PRML, which he published in 1970 and 1971. The PRML method allows more data to be stored on computer hard disks than the conventional recording method and retrieves stored data with fewer errors. During the following 20 years, Dolivo and colleagues perfected Kobayashi’s ideas, allowing IBM to introduce a hard disk drive using PRML in 1990 and leading to a number of years in which storage capacity increased by about 50 percent each year. This technology is now widely adopted as the industry standard in personal computers and MP3 players such as the iPod. Eleftheriou is recognized for the invention of further improvements that have been applied to IBM disk-drive products since 2000.

Kobayashi received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1967 and went to work as a research staff member at IBM’s Thomas Watson Research Center, where he conducted this seminal research on data storage techniques. After a distinguished career at IBM, Kobayashi returned to Princeton in 1986 as dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science. He served as dean through 1991, when he assumed full-time teaching and research duties in the Department of Electrical Engineering.

The Eduard Rhein Foundation has honored outstanding achievements in technology since 1979. Recipients of its Basic Research or Technology Award have included the leading figures in fields of computers and communications, such as Claude Shannon, the father of modern information technology, and Tim Berners-Lee, who created the World Wide Web. Another Princeton professor, Ingrid Daubechies of mathematics, received the 2000 Basic Research Award.