President Obama Meets Laureates of Kavli Prizes
At the White House on Monday, President Barack Obama met in the Oval Office with the seven U.S. recipients of the 2010 Kavli Prizes to recognize and honor their seminal contributions to the three fields for which the Prizes are awarded — astrophysics, nanoscience and neuroscience.
Joined by the President’s science advisor, John P. Holdren, President Obama greeted Kavli Prize Laureates Roger Angel (University of Arizona), Jerry E. Nelson (University of California, Santa Cruz), Donald M. Eigler (IBM Almaden Research Center), James E. Rothman (Yale University), Richard H. Scheller (Genentech), Nadrian C. Seeman (New York University), and Thomas C. Sudhof (Stanford University).
Accompanying the laureates were Fred Kavli, founder and chairman of The Kavli Foundation; Robert W. Conn, president of The Kavli Foundation; and Wegger Chr. Strommen, the Norwegian Ambassador to the United States.
The Kavli Prizes are a partnership between The Kavli Foundation (U.S.), the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research.
“We are extremely grateful to the President for the honor of this visit, and for his strong and heartfelt commitment to scientific research and discovery,” said Fred Kavli. “It reflects the nation’s deep support for innovative research that scientists across the country rely upon, including the foundational research discoveries of the 2010 Kavli Laureates.”
The Kavli Laureates received their awards for research that made it possible to look more deeply and clearly into the universe, to control matter on the nano scale, and to understand how the brain’s nerve cells communicate.
The 2010 Kavli Prize Laureates were announced last year and received their awards in a ceremony held in Oslo, Norway. The call for nominations for the 2012 Kavli Prizes occurs this fall, according to The Kavli Foundation.
