Enrico Fermi Award: Dr. Raymond Davis and Dr. John Bahcall

Dr. Raymond Davis, Jr., the 2002 Nobel Prize winner in Physics, and research professor of physics at Penn, along with Dr. John Bahcall, HON '2000, a professor at Princeton, and Dr. Seymour Sack, retired from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, are this year's winners of the Enrico Fermi Award, a presidential award given for a lifetime of achievement in the field of nuclear energy.

Drs. Bahcall and Davis will receive the award for their research in neutrino physics.

Dr. Sack will receive the award for his contributions to national security.

The winners will receive a gold medal and a citation signed by President Bush and Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham. Dr. Sack will receive a $187,500 honorarium. Drs. Davis and Bahcall will share an award each receiving a $93,750 honorarium.

"The contributions these distinguished scientists have made to understanding the world around us and to our national security are immense," Secretary Abraham said. "Their lifetime of innovative research follows in the tradition of Enrico Fermi, the great scientist we commemorate with this award."

The citation for the award to Dr. Davis and Dr. Bahcall reads: "For their innovative research in astrophysics leading to a revolution in understanding the properties of the elusive neutrino, the lightest known particle with mass." Dr. Bahcall and Dr. Davis are the scientists most responsible for the field of solar neutrino physics and neutrino astronomy. Dr. Bahcall, a theorist, and Dr. Davis, an experimentalist, helped to determine that neutrinos have mass and that electron neutrinos oscillate into many "flavors" on their way from the sun to the earth.

Dr. Davis received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in chemistry from the University of Maryland and his Ph.D. degree from Yale. He began his career at Dow Chemical Co. He worked at Monsanto Chemical Company and from 1948-1984 was a senior chemist at DOE's Brookhaven National Laboratory. In 1984, he became a research professor of physics at Penn.