The 2012 Edith and Peter O'Donnell Award in Medicine
 Philipp E. Scherer, Ph.D.
Dr. Philipp E. Scherer is professor and director of the Touchstone Diabetes Center at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (UT Southwestern) in Dallas. Dr. Scherer received his doctorate from the University of Basel in Switzerland followed by post-doctoral training at the Whitehead Institute at MIT. In 1997, he joined the faculty of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York where he was Professor of Cell Biology and Medicine. Throughout his career, he has maintained an interest in processes related to cellular and systemic energy homeostasis. During his doctoral studies, he identified several components of the mitochondrial protein import machinery. While a post-doc, he identified adiponectin, one of the first secretory factors that almost exclusively originates in adipose tissue and which is currently widely studied by many different research groups.
Dr. Scherer’s research team at UT Southwestern is an important component of the highly integrated effort in the area of metabolism that involves multiple centers and departments. Current efforts in Dr. Scherer’s laboratory are focused on the identification and physiological characterization of novel proteins that serve as potential links between the adipocyte, liver, the pancreatic beta cell and the processes of whole body energy homeostasis, inflammation, cancer and cardiovascular disease. His research team aims to identify novel targets for pharmacological intervention and to further define the role of adipose tissue as an endocrine organ.
Dr. Scherer has been on the faculty of UT Southwestern since 2007 as a member of the departments of Internal Medicine and Cell Biology. He holds the Gifford O. Touchstone Jr. and Randolph G. Touchstone Distinguished Chair in Diabetes Research and is a member of the Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center. For his efforts in the area of diabetes research, he received the 2005 Outstanding Scientific Achievement Award of the American Diabetes Association. For the past 10 years, he has served as a member and chair of many different review panels at the National Institutes of Health and with various foundations. He has received visiting professorships, has given many named lectures at national and international institutions, has served on external advisory committees for various centers and institutions and has been appointed as an associate editor and editorial board member for a variety of journals.
The 2012 Edith and Peter O'Donnell Award in Engineering
 Michael W. Deem, Ph.D.
Dr. Michael W. Deem is the John W. Cox Professor of Bioengineering and professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at Rice University. Dr. Deem works in the areas of evolution, immunology and materials, and has brought tools from statistical physics to bear on problems in these areas. Of particular focus to him are those biological issues involving randomness, diversity and correlations. Dr. Deem has developed methods to quantify vaccine effectiveness and antigenic distance for influenza; methods to sculpt the immune system to mitigate immunodominance in dengue fever; a physical theory of the competition that allows HIV to escape from the immune system; the first exact solution of a quasispecies theory of evolution that accounts for cross-species genetic exchange; a hierarchical approach to protein molecular evolution; a “thermodynamic” formulation of evolution; and a theory for how biological modularity spontaneously arises in an evolving system.
In the materials field, Dr. Deem is interested in structure, nucleation and function of zeolites. He developed the widely-used DIFFAX and ZEFSA methods in this area. He provided the first atomistic simulations of silica nucleation under zeolite synthesis conditions and has developed a database of hypothetical zeolite frameworks that contains greater than 4 million structures. He is the recipient of a number of awards, including the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, Allan P. Colburn Award and the Professional Progress Award of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). Dr. Deem will be a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar during 2012–2013. He is an editorial board member of the journals Protein Engineering, Design and Selection and Physical Biology, a member of the Board of Governors for the Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter and was a Rice Senator. Dr. Deem is also a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, the Biomedical Engineering Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society.
The 2012 Edith and Peter O'Donnell Award in Science
 Karl Gebhardt, Ph.D.
Dr. Karl Gebhardt is the Herman and Joan Suit Professor of Astrophysics in the Department of Astronomy at The University of Texas at Austin. He grew up in the snow-filled winters of Rochester, New York. His career has taken him through Michigan State University, Rutgers University (where he received his Ph.D. in 1994), fellowships at the University of Michigan and University of California at Santa Cruz and eventually to The University of Texas at Austin in 2000.
Dr. Gebhardt works on a variety of galaxy studies, ranging from black holes to dark matter to dark energy. He has won numerous awards, including the Northeastern Graduate Schools Dissertation Award (1995), a Hubble Fellowship from NASA (1997), the Teaching Excellence Award from The University of Texas (2003), the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award and a position on the McDonald Observatory Board of Visitors (2004).
Dr. Gebhardt works with numerous undergraduate and graduate students and involves them in all levels of his research. Most of his career has focused on understanding the role that black holes play in the formation of a galaxy. He has measured more black hole masses than anyone in the world and is actively targeting many more galaxies for this study. His recent work focused on understanding dark energy with the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX). It was shown a few years ago that the universe is expanding much faster than what had been expected. Scientists have called this extra expansion dark energy, a mysterious force that works to counteract the pull of gravity by pushing the universe apart. The discovery of the accelerated expansion was the subject for the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics; the next step is to understand the physical nature of that expansion. Dr. Gebhardt and his colleagues have outlined a unique approach to the study of
dark energy using the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at the McDonald Observatory and expect their result will be the most accurate measure of dark energy for many years into the future.
The 2012 Edith and Peter O'Donnell Award in Technology Innovation
 Ted S. Moise, Ph.D.
Dr. Ted S. Moise is the Analog CMOS and Embedded Roadmap Manager within Texas Instruments’ (TI) Analog Technology Development organization. He is the co-inventor and lead innovator responsible for the research, development and production of ferroelectric random-access memory (FRAM) embedded with advanced silicon integrated circuits. FRAM is a fast-write, low-power, non-volatile memory that enables improved performance and extended operational lifetime for medical and consumer electronics.
Dr. Moise earned Bachelor of Science degrees in physics and engineering in 1987 from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He earned a doctorate degree in electrical engineering from Yale University in 1992. While at Yale, he was honored with the Harding Bliss Prize for Excellence in Engineering and Applied Science, which recognizes the student who has done the most to further the intellectual life of the department.
Dr. Moise joined TI in 1992, where he was responsible for the development of high-performance quantum-effect devices and circuits. In 1997, he started work on the development of scaled ferroelectric capacitors leading to the first demonstration of low-voltage, high-density, embedded FRAM in 2002. FRAM is a non-volatile memory that stores data even when the power is removed. FRAM enables write speeds 100 times faster than conventional flash memory while operating at lower power. In conjunction with Ramtron International Corporation, Dr. Moise and his team at TI produced the first high-density (4MB) FRAM product on an advanced (130nm) silicon technology node in 2007. By 2009, Dr. Moise and his team had developed the first advanced, high-volume FRAM production capability in the semiconductor industry. In the past two years, TI has shipped more than 50 million FRAM devices with applications ranging from power management systems to ultra-low power medical devices.
Dr. Moise is an emeritus distinguished member of TI’s technical staff. He has authored or co-authored over 70 papers, served as conference and session chair for several international technical conferences, presented numerous invited lectures and holds more than 40 issued patents. In 2008, he was presented with an outstanding achievement award at the International Symposium on Integrated Ferroelectrics conference.
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