David Reidy of the philosophy department has won a 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship to support his work on an intellectual biography of John Rawls, perhaps the preeminent political philosopher of the 20th century. Reidy will spend the 2009-2010 academic year working as an NEH Fellow on the project. He is currently Lindsay Young Associate Professor of Philosophy and Adjunct Associate Professor of Political Science. He is also the Director of the Center for Applied and Professional Ethics.
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Lou Gross of the department of ecology and evolutionary biology has been appointed a member of the National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences Board on Life Sciences. The board has oversight on most of the biology and biomedical activities carried out by the NRC.
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MIT Press has just announced the release of a book by John C. Malone of the UT Knoxville department of psychology. The book is titled "Psychology: Pythagoras to Present." According to the MIT Press Web site, the book "offers both breadth and depth, an engaging style and rigorous scholarship."
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Recent work involving UT Knoxville physicists has helped make the properties of the nucleus–its size, its shape, the energy that holds it together–a bit more easy to predict.
The collaborative team of Gaute Hagen, Thomas Papenbrock, David Dean, and Morten Hjorth-Jensen has moved a little farther across the chart of the nuclides, the map that arranges nuclei from light to heavy. Over the past decade, scientists have been able to compute the properties of the lighter nuclei starting from the established laws of physics. But beyond nuclei with relatively few protons and neutrons, it has been frustrating to make calculations across the chart because the systems become much heavier.
Using coupled-cluster theory, the team computed the binding energies, radii, and density for isotopes of helium, oxygen, calcium, and nickel. Oak Ridge National Laboratory recognized this work at its annual Awards Night on November 14.
Papenbrock is an assistant professor of physics with a joint appointment at the ORNL Physics Division. Dean and Haute are with the ORNL Physics Division; Dean is also an adjunct associate professor with UT Physics. Hjorth-Jensen is with the University of Oslo.