The Royal Society of Chemistry awarded UCSB chemistry professor and director of the Material Science Lab Craig Hawker the 2012 Centenary Prize for chemistry in recognition of Hawker’s innovative work with novel polymers.

The RSC Awards Working Group annually selects three nominated profes- sors for the honor, which includes a medal, a certificate and a cash prize of £5,000 ($7,879.29). Hawker worked as a scientist at the Center for Polymer Interfaces and Macromolecular Assemblies for IBM for 11 years before beginning work at UCSB.

The Centenary Prize is awarded not only for the recipient’s impact on the field of chemistry, but also on the basis of a series of lectures given by contestants in the British Isles.

Numerous awards have been endowed upon Hawker since 1981. Most recently, he has been named a chair professor at Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, an Arthur C. Cope Scholar and an elected fellow of the American Chemical Society.

The United States Department of Energy bestowed UCSB graduate stu- dent Eric Dzienkowski with a DOE Office of Science Graduate Fellowship Award for his research on matrix models.

Dzienkowski works with physics pro- fessor David Berenstein to study infor- mation loss within black holes. The DOE SCGF award was created in 2009 to further research and development impor- tant to the DOE laboratories’ Office of Science and scholarly communities.

The endowment will grant partial tuition support up to $10,500, an annual income of $35,000 and research funds of $5,000 for the next three years. The recipients undergo a meticulous review by qualified authorities from various univer- sities.

From July 29 to Aug. 1, there will be an annual DOE SCGF meeting at the Brookhaven National Laboratory for fel- low recipients to present their research to DOE researchers and each other.

— Staff Report