Patrice Turchi was installed as president of The Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society (TMS) for 2015. An active member of TMS for more than 25 years, he has served on the TMS board of directors as chair of the Electronic, Magnetic, and Photonic Materials Division (now the Functional Materials Division), chaired the Alloy Phases Committee and various administrative committees, been a member of several technical advisory groups, organized 15 TMS symposia, and served as vice president of the society in 2014. Turchi’s research interests encompass computational materials science and condensed-matter physics, with an emphasis on alloy theory from first-principles electronic structure and the stability and physical properties of complex assemblies. TMS covers the entire range of materials and engineering and has nearly 13,000 members in 94 countries.
Jeffrey Drocco was selected as a Biosecurity Fellow under the Emerging Leaders in Biosecurity Initiative, which is operated by the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Drocco is one of 28 fellows—selected from nearly 100 applicants—participating in the competitive program, which is designed to create and sustain a multidisciplinary and intergenerational biosecurity community made up of young professionals and current leaders. The program includes presentations and briefings at the White House, the Pentagon, and the United Kingdom’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory and Pirbright Institute.
Lawrence Livermore climate scientist Ken Sperber received the 2014 Editors’ Citation for Excellence in Refereeing from the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU’s) Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres. The citation is chosen by AGU editors, who are asked to select outstanding reviewers of submitted papers from the previous year, across all AGU journals. Sperber’s specialty is the variability of monsoons on seasonal through decadal timescales. He is a longtime member of the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison and is currently working to understand the potential impact of climate change on monsoons using numerical simulations from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5.