The Gold Medal of the Israel Chemical Society for 2011 will be awarded to Professor Dan Shechtman of the Technion, winner of the chemistry Nobel Prize. Prof. Ehud Keinan, President of the Israel Chemical Society, made this announcement indicating that the medal will be awarded at the opening ceremony of the 77 Annual Meeting of the ICS in Kfar HaMaccabiah in Ramat Gan on February 7, 2012. Approximately 1,000 faculty members and students from all universities and technological colleges, chemists and chemical engineers, foreign guests and a large delegation of scientists from the University of California at Berkeley. After the award ceremony, Prof. Shechtman will deliver the first plenary lecture.
The Medal is the highest honor awarded by the ICS, which is considered the oldest and most influential scientific organization in Israel (since 1933). Its main objectives are the promotion of chemistry research and teaching in all levels of schools and higher education, and promoting the chemical industry in Israel.
Prof. Shechtman is joining a distinguished group of medalists: Avram Hershko, Aaron Ciechanover and Ruben Fauncz, all three from the Technion, Joshua Jortner of Tel Aviv University, Ada Yonath, Zeev Luz, Meir Lahav, Leslie Leiserowitz and Meir Wilchek, all five from the Weizmann Institute of Science, and Mr. Eli Hurvitz of Teva Pharmaceuticals.
Prof. Keinan, who also serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Israel Journal of Chemistry, announced that the journal is devoting a special issue to the topic of quasi-crystals. Their discovery by research professor Dan Schechtman awarded him with Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2011.
Shechtman was born in Tel Aviv on January 24, 1941 and grew up in Ramat Gan and Petah Tikva, was a member of the Hashomer Hatzair movement. In 1962 he began studying at the Technion where he received a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering in 1966. He continued his studies at the Technion in the faculty of materials engineering where he received his master’s degree in 1968, and Ph.D. in 1972.
Prof. Shechtman was an NRC fellow at the Aerospace Research Laboratories at Wright Patterson AFB, Ohio, where he studied for three years the microstructure and physical metallurgy of titanium aluminides. In 1975 he joined the department of materials engineering at Technion. In 1981–1983 he was on Sabbatical at Johns Hopkins University, where he studied rapidly solidified aluminum transition metal alloys, in a joint program with NBS. During this study he discovered the Icosahedral Phase, which opened the new field of quasiperiodic crystals. Shechtman experienced several years of hostility toward his non-periodic interpretation before others began to confirm and accept it. No less a figure than Linus Pauling said he was “talking nonsense” and “There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists.” Shechtman’s Nobel Prize winning work was in the area of quasicrystals, ordered crystalline materials lacking repeating structures, such as this Al-Pd-Mn alloy. Through Shechtman’s discovery, several other groups were able to form similar quasicrystals, finding these materials to have low thermal and electrical conductivity, while possessing high structural stability. Quasicrystals have also been found naturally. Quasicrystalline materials could be used in a large number of applications, including the formation of durable steel used for fine instrumentation, and non-stick insulation for electrical wires and cooking equipment. In 1992–1994 he was on sabbatical at National Institute of Standards and Technology, where he studied the effect of the defect structure of CVD diamond on its growth and properties. Prof. Shechtman’s Technion research is conducted in the Louis Edelstein Center, and in the Wolfson Centre, which is headed by him. He served on several Technion Senate Committees and headed one of them. Shechtman joined the Iowa State faculty in 2004.
Shechtman serves as an Adjunct Professor at the State University of Iowa, he is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences, member of the National Academy of Engineering of the United States and a member of European Academy of Sciences.
Before winning the Nobel Prize, Shechtman received numerous awards, including the European Materials Research Society Award, EMET Prize in Chemistry, Muriel & David Jacknow Award for Excellence in Teaching, Gregori Aminoff Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Wolf Prize in Physics, the Israel Prize, the Weizmann Science Award, the Rothschild Prize in Engineering, the New England Academic Award of the Technion, the International Award for New Materials of the American Physical Society, and the Physics Award of the Friedenberg Fund for the Advancement of Science and Education.