The Franklin Institute honors nine scientists and engineers on its 200th anniversary
The winners come to the Philadelphia for four days of lectures and ceremonies in April.
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The Franklin Institute announced nine winners of its annual awards in the sciences and business leadership on Tuesday, honoring research on such phenomena as how plants harness energy from sunlight, the changes in children’s brains as they learn language, and the hidden “plumbing” that powers the internet.
The winners will come to Philadelphia for four days of lectures and other events from April 15 to 18, ending with a ceremony at the science museum, which is celebrating its 200th anniversary.
The institute started giving out awards in its first year, 1824, though back then they focused more on manufacturing and craftmanship. Among the inaugural winners were a bassoon maker and the inventor of a “very ingenious machine” for cutting and piercing iron plates to make stove pipes.
This year’s winners have tackled more complex problems such as climate change and cancer, but they share a zest for innovation with their counterparts from two centuries ago, said Larry Dubinski, the museum’s president and chief executive officer.
“In this milestone year, the awards program will celebrate the extraordinary achievements of our 2024 laureates and serve as a reminder of the Franklin Institute’s rich history and its ongoing commitment to shaping the future of science and technology,” he said in a news release.
The museum has given awards to more than 2,000 scientists and business leaders over the years, including 125 who would later win a Nobel Prize.
Three of them were honored just last fall with a Nobel. They included University of Pennsylvania scientists Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, whose work on messenger RNA paved the way for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines against COVID-19, and Columbia University’s Louis E. Brus, honored for his research on minuscule particles called quantum dots.
This year’s winners of Franklin Institute awards include several who have made their mark in education as well as science, mentoring younger researchers, running academic departments, and translating science for a public audience. Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Paula Hammond and AMD chief executive officer Lisa Su, for example, both serve on the Biden administration’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
Then there’s Harvard physics professor David A. Weitz who, in addition to studying arcane properties of polymers and gels, teaches non-science majors about the physics of cooking. He has been known to soft boil an egg to show how proteins respond to heat, and he makes molten chocolate cakes to demonstrate the diffusion of thermal energy.
For broad impact, none could top Robert M. Metcalfe, a professor emeritus at the University of Texas-Austin, who is winning a Franklin award in electrical engineering. He was a leader in designing Ethernet, which he has described as the internal “plumbing” that makes internet communications possible.
“Ethernet was the plumbing upgrade the internet needed in the 1970s,” he said in a 2023 interview. “Ethernet enabled the transition from … a network of time-shared computers servicing dumb terminals, to an internetwork of personal computers, their servers, and routers.”
The Franklin award winners are:
David A. Weitz (Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science): A physics professor at Harvard University, Weitz studies the properties of “squishy” materials such as gels, foams, and colloids, and he also pioneered the use of microfluidic devices for rapid disease screening and drug discovery. He worked at Penn for four years before going to Harvard in 1999.
Lisa Su (Bower Award for Business Leadership): In 2014, Su was named chief executive officer of semiconductor maker AMD, and by 2022, she had led the Austin, Texas, company past its rival Intel in terms of total market value. In mid-2023, Su announced plans for AMD to make a new chip for artificial intelligence applications. An electrical engineer by training, she has worked to increase opportunity for women in her field.
Gabriela S. Schlau-Cohen (NextGen Award): An associate professor of chemistry at MIT, Schlau-Cohen studies how plants derive energy from sunlight with high efficiency while protecting themselves from sun damage. She reveals these inner processes by hitting plants with ultrafast laser pulses. The NextGen award is given each year to an exceptional early-career researcher, and it comes with a $10,000 honorarium.
Paula T. Hammond (Chemistry): The head of MIT’s chemical engineering department, Hammond has developed techniques to create ultra-thin films of polymers for use in drug delivery, medical imaging, and battery technology. She has designed nanoparticles that deliver drugs to cancerous tumors with precision targeting, and recently has focused on ovarian cancer.
Janet F. Werker (Computer and cognitive science): At the University of British Columbia, Werker studies how infants perceive speech and how they integrate those signals with the expressions on adults’ faces. She also explores how infants growing up in bilingual environments keep the two languages distinct.
Paul D. N. Hebert (Earth and environmental science): At the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, Hebert spent much of his early career studying water fleas before he had the idea to categorize all living things with a “bar code” — a representative fingerprint from their DNA. Since 2003, the project has drawn contributions from more than 1,000 researchers in 41 countries. He once joked: “I basically wasted the first 30 years of my science career. DNA barcoding was the best idea I ever had.”
Robert M. Metcalfe (Electrical engineering): Widely recognized as a key architect of Ethernet, the system of wired networks that enables the internet, Metcalfe is modest about his role. When accepting another award in 2022, he said it was “dangerous” for him to be singled out for credit, when hundreds of people were responsible. He retired from UT Austin in 2021.
Joanne Chory (Life science): Like her fellow Franklin award-winner Schlau-Cohen, Chory researches how plants sense and respond to light, but she approaches the problem from the standpoint of genetics. At the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., Chory explores ways to tackle climate change by optimizing plants’ ability to capture and store carbon.
Mary C. Boyce (Mechanical engineering): As dean of Columbia’s engineering school from 2013 to 2021, Boyce recruited more than 100 new faculty members, doubling the number of women as well as the number of women with tenure. In 2023, she returned to full-time research after a two-year stint as university provost. Boyce is known for developing a popular method for modeling the behavior of polymers, used by engineers in the design of products from airplanes to sporting goods.