Two Physics Illinois alumni—Ahmet Yildiz and Miguel Morales—have been awarded the 2013 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the US government on scientists and engineers in the early stages of their independent research careers. Yildiz holds an appointment as an assistant professor of physics and molecular cell biology at the University of California at Berkeley; he earned his doctoral degree in biophysics and computational biology from the U. of I. in 2004, working with Professor Paul Selvin. Morales, a staff scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Berkeley, CA, earned his doctoral degree in physics from the U. of I. in 2009 with Founder Professor of Physics David Ceperley.
At UCB, Yildiz leads a single-molecule biophysics research group. His current research focuses on the mechanism of cytoplasmic dynein, the protection of telomeres, and intraflagellar transport and cell motility. Yildiz’s research group applies techniques from both molecular biology and biophysics to the understanding of mechanisms that underlie cellular organization and motility. Using single-molecule imaging and optical trapping, his group directly observes molecular motions, time courses of reactions, and heterogeneity in subpopulations of proteins.
One of the team’s major goals is to understand how microtubular motors work individually and collectively to power intracellular transport and organismal motility. A second research goal is to use super-resolution imaging techniques to determine how DNA-associated proteins alter the structure and spatial organization of DNA.
Selvin commented, “Ahmet is totally deserving of the PECASE award. As a graduate student in my lab, he published two papers in Science, including a cover story, and made the cover of another journal. And it took him only 2.5 years to graduate. He then got the GE and Science Prize for Young Life Scientists. And, he's a very nice person, always willing to help out others. He's just fantastic.”
“I feel both honored and happy to be recognized in this way,” shares Yildiz.
Miguel Morales works in the Condensed Matter and Materials Division of Lawrence Livermore Lab. He researches first principles description of materials at high pressure and temperature using density functional theory and quantum Monte Carlo; on the development and application of quantum Monte Carlo methods for strongly correlated materials; and on nuclear quantum effects in low-Z materials. His team studies light elements—hydrogen, helium, lithium and mixtures of these—at high pressures to reveal interesting properties caused by delicate electron correlation effects and strong nuclear quantum effects.
Morales’s team has been able to provide answers to several longstanding questions. Identifying these unusual properties—particularly of hydrogen and hydrogen-helium mixtures—is critical to the understanding of the structure of giant gas planets and stars.
"My main goal is to develop first-principles simulation methods with predictive capabilities, particularly in extreme conditions of high pressure and high temperature where experiments are either hard or impossible to perform,” explains Morales. “With the rapid increase in computational power seen over the last decade, we are quickly reaching a point where our methods can be used to calculate accurate properties of most materials, from ambient conditions to the conditions found in the center of stars and planets.”
"I felt extremely happy when I heard the news,” he adds. “This award gives me a lot of encouragement to keep focusing on my current research path.”
Ceperley remarks, “Miguel solved two of the long-standing problems concerning our understanding of hydrogen and helium at high pressures as a graduate student at the U. of I.: estimates of the critical temperature of the liquid-liquid transition and the mixing transition in liquid hydrogen-helium. Both transitions are important for understanding the interiors of hydrogenic planets such as Jupiter and Saturn. His award is very well deserved.”
During his graduate studies, Morales was awarded a Stewardship Science Graduate Fellowship for his work on high-pressure hydrogen and helium.
The awards, established by President Clinton in 1996, are coordinated by the Office of Science and Technology Policy within the Executive Office of the President. Awardees are selected for their pursuit of innovative research at the frontiers of science and technology and for their commitment to community service as demonstrated through scientific leadership, public education, or community outreach.