Video Biographies
Videobios
For nearly 200 years, The Franklin Institute has honored the greatest minds in science, engineering, and technology. Recognizing brilliant men and women from around the world is one important way that the Institute preserves Benjamin Franklin's legacy. The following videos celebrate selected laureates of these prestigious awards.
Quick Topic Links: Astronomy & Space Science | Biology & Biomedicine | Chemistry | Computing & Information Technology | Earth Science | Engineering & Materials | Environmental Science | Health Sciences | Mathematics | Physics | Psychiatry & Psychology
Astronomy & Space Science
The 2016 Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science was awarded to William J. Borucki for his vision and perseverance in developing techniques for measuring the brightness of stars to unprecedented accuracy, and for providing the scientific leadership for NASA’s Kepler space mission, which discovered thousands of planetary systems and demonstrated that Earth-sized exoplanets are as common as stars.
The 2013 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics was presented to Alexander Dalgarno for his many fundamental contributions to the development of the field of molecular astrophysics, which led to a better understanding of interstellar space, including the giant molecular clouds that are the birthplaces of stars and planets.
The 2009 Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science was awarded to Sandra M. Faber for extraordinary advances in our knowledge of the properties of distant galaxies, dark matter, large scale structure of the universe, and black holes in galactic nuclei; and for innovative leadership in the development of astronomical facilities.
The 2012 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics was presented to Rashid Sunyaev for his monumental contributions to understanding the early universe and the properties of black holes.
Biology & Biomedicine
The 2015 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science was presented to Cornelia Bargmann for her contributions to neurobiology that have led to major discoveries elucidating the relationship between genes, neurons, neural circuits, and behavior.
The 2012 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science was presented to Sean B. Carroll for proposing and demonstrating that the diversity and multiplicity of animal life is largely due to the different ways that the same genes are regulated rather than to mutation of the genes themselves.
The 2011 Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science was presented to George Church for innovative and creative contributions to genomic science, including the development of DNA sequencing technologies, as well as for his subsequent efforts to promote personal genomics and synthetic biology.
The 2014 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science was awarded to Joachim Frank for the development of Cryo-Electron Microscopy, for using this technology to investigate the structure of large organic molecules at high resolution, and for discoveries regarding the mechanism of protein synthesis in cells.
The 2018 Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science was presented to Philippe Horvath for the foundational discovery of the role of CRISPR-Cas as a microbial system of adaptive immunity that has been developed as a powerful tool for precise editing of diverse genomes.
The 2013 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science was presented to Rudolf Jaenisch for discovering heritable controls of gene expression that are independent of the DNA sequence information. These mechanisms affect normal development and diseases, such as cancer, and suggest promising new therapies.
The 2016 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science was awarded to Robert S. Langer for his design and implementation of multiple innovative drug delivery systems, and for his founding work in the field of tissue engineering.
The 2017 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science was awarded to Douglas C. Wallace for demonstrating the maternal inheritance of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in humans, using mtDNA variation to reconstruct ancient human migrations, identifying the first mtDNA mutation associated with an inherited disease, and showing that mutant mtDNA can profoundly affect the nuclear genome, causing complex diseases, thereby leading the way to therapies for those diseases and the aging process.
Chemistry
The 2012 Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science was presented to Louis E. Brus for his seminal discoveries and scientific leadership, which have made semiconductor nanocrystals, their synthesis, characterization, and theory a cornerstone of modern chemistry.
Goodenough, John B.
The 2018 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Chemistry was presented to John B. Goodenough for his development of the first practical, rechargeable lithium-ion battery cathode material, lithium cobalt oxide, which has revolutionized lightweight, portable electric power.
Lippard, Stephen J.
The 2015 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Chemistry was presented to Stephen J. Lippard for his pioneering research on the role of metal atoms in biology and medicine, including the study of platinum anticancer drugs and of the structure and function of an enzyme that allows microbes to live on natural gas.
The 2017 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Chemistry was presented to Krzysztof Matyjaszewski with Mitsuo Sawamoto, for their seminal contributions to the development of a new polymerization process involving metal catalysts. This powerful process affords unprecedented control of polymer composition and architecture, making possible new materials including improved composites, coatings, dispersants, and biomedical polymers.
The 2013 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Chemistry was presented to Jerrold Meinwald for his pioneering work leading to the establishment of the field of chemical ecology. His fundamental studies of how chemicals act as repellents and attractants between organisms pave the way for the use of these chemicals in a variety of biomedical, agricultural, forestry and household applications.
The 2011 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Chemistry was presented to K. C. Nicolaou for his achievements in synthetic organic chemistry, particularly for the development of methods for preparing complex substances found in nature, which have potential applications in the field of medicine.
The 2017 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Chemistry was presented to Mitsuo Sawamoto with Krzysztof Matyjaszewski, for their seminal contributions to the development of a new polymerization process involving metal catalysts. This powerful process affords unprecedented control of polymer composition and architecture, making possible new materials including improved composites, coatings, dispersants, and biomedical polymers.
The 2016 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Chemistry was presented to Nadrian C. Seeman for his conceptualization and demonstration that DNA can be used as a construction material that can spontaneously form sub-microscopic structures of diverse shapes and functions, with potential applications in disease treatment, mechanics, and computation.
The 2010 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Chemistry was presented to JoAnne Stubbe for uncovering the intricate processes by which cells safely use free radicals, for developing new cancer treatments, and for improving the production of environmentally friendly biodegradable polymers.
The 2014 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Chemistry was presented to Christopher T. Walsh for seminal studies at the interface of chemistry, biology and medicine that revolutionized the development of antibiotics for the treatment of disease and provided the foundation for the new field of Chemical Biology.
Computing & Information Technology
The 2009 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science was awarded to Ruzena Bajcsy for contributions to robotics and computer vision, specifically the development of active perception and the creation of methods to improve our understanding of medical images.
The 2018 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science was presented to Vinton Gray Cerf, with Robert E. Kahn, for enabling the Internet by developing TCP/IP, the set of methods that allows effective communication between millions of computer networks.
The 2014 Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science was presented to Edmund Clarke for his leading role in the conception and development of techniques for automatically verifying the correctness of a broad array of computer systems, including those found in transportation, communications, and medicine.
The 2010 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science was presented to Shafrira Goldwasser for her fundamental contributions to the theoretical foundation of modern cryptography, which led to techniques that can guarantee secure access to the Internet.
The 2018 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science was presented to Robert E. Kahn, with Vinton Gray Cerf, for enabling the Internet by developing TCP/IP, the set of methods that allows effective communication between millions of computer networks.
The 2016 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science was awarded to Yale N. Patt for his pioneering contributions to the design of modern microprocessors that achieve higher performance by automatically identifying computer instructions that can be performed simultaneously.
The 2012 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science was presented to Vladimir Vapnik for his fundamental contributions to our understanding of machine learning, which allows computers to classify new data based on statistical models derived from earlier examples, and for his invention of widely used machine-learning techniques.
Earth Science
The 2016 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Earth and Environmental Science was presented to Brian F. Atwater for his pioneering studies of coastal sedimentary records, which revealed a history of great earthquakes and tsunamis in the Pacific Northwest over millennia and led to a vastly improved understanding of these hazards globally.
The 2013 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Earth and Environmental Science was presented to Robert A. Berner for deepening our understanding of the Earth system through studies of the chemistry of geologic processes and their influence on the atmosphere and oceans.
The 2017 Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science was presented to Claude Lorius for iconic contributions to the understanding of global climate change from the analysis of greenhouse gas concentrations in ice cores from Antarctica, including discovering the glacial-interglacial cyclic relation between atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration and temperature that governs past and future climate.
The 2010 Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science was presented to W. Richard Peltier for fundamental advances in the understanding of Earth systems, by demonstrating profound interconnections between surface climate variability, as evidenced in the hydrosphere and cryosphere, and the internal properties and dynamics of the solid Earth.
The 2014 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Earth and Environmental Science was awarded to Lisa Tauxe for the development of observational techniques and theoretical models providing an improved understanding of the behavior of, and variations in intensity of, the Earth's magnetic field through geologic time.
The 2018 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Earth and Environmental Science was awarded to Susan Trumbore for her pioneering use of radiocarbon measurements in forests and soils to assess the flow of carbon between the biosphere and atmosphere, with implications for the understanding of future climate change.
The 2012 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Earth and Environmental Science was presented jointly to Lonnie G. Thompson and Ellen Stone Mosley-Thompson for their collective studies of ice cores from around the world, which have improved the understanding of Earth's climate history, including the role of the tropics in global climate change.
Engineering & Materials
The 2018 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Mechanical Engineering was presented to Adrian Bejan for his pioneering interdisciplinary contributions in thermodynamics and convection heat transfer that have improved the performance of engineering systems, and for constructal theory, which predicts natural design and its evolution in engineering, scientific, and social systems.
The 2017 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Materials Science and Engineering was presented to Mildred S. Dresselhaus for her fundamental contributions to the understanding and exploitation of carbon nanomaterials, such as the spheres known as buckminsterfullerenes, the cylindrical pipes called nanotubes, and the single-atom-thick sheets of carbon known as graphene, and for launching the field of low-dimensional thermoelectricity, the direct conversion of heat to electricity.
The 2016 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering was presented to Solomon W. Golomb for pioneering work in space communications and the design of digital spread spectrum signals, transmissions that provide security, interference suppression, and precise location for cryptography; missile guidance; defense, space, and cellular communications; radar; sonar; and GPS.
The 2015 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering was presented to Roger F. Harrington for pioneering an electromagnetic modeling method for accurate simulation, design, and optimization of radio wave antennas and devices, enabling advances in communication, radar imaging, and target recognition.
The 2012 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Mechanical Engineering was presented to Zvi Hashin for groundbreaking contributions to the accurate analysis of composite materials, which have enabled practical engineering designs of lightweight composite structures, commonly used today in aerospace, marine, automotive, and civil infrastructure.
The 2017 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering was presented to Nick Holonyak, Jr. for the development of the first visible (red) laser and LED used in displays and lighting, and the use of various alloys in colored light sources, which led to reduced energy consumption worldwide and contributed to the realization of optical data communications as the backbone of the Internet.
The 2014 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering was awarded to Shunichi Iwasaki and Mark Kryder for the development and realization of the system of Perpendicular Magnetic Recording, which has enabled a dramatic increase in the storage capacity of computer-readable media.
The 2014 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering was awarded to Shunichi Iwasaki and Mark Kryder for the development and realization of the system of Perpendicular Magnetic Recording, which has enabled a dramatic increase in the storage capacity of computer-readable media.
The 2017 Bower Award for Business Leadership was presented to Alan Mulally for his extraordinary career in the aeronautics, astronautics, and automotive industries, particularly for his transformative leadership of the Ford Motor Company, which revitalized the company’s legacy as an icon of American business and innovation.
The 2014 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Mechanical Engineering was awarded to Ali Hasan Nayfeh for the development of novel methods to model complex engineering systems in structural dynamics, acoustics, fluid mechanics and electromechanical systems.
The 2012 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering was presented to Jerry Nelson for his pioneering contributions to the development of segmented-mirror telescopes.
The 2018 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering was presented to Manijeh Razeghi for the realization of high-power terahertz frequency sources operating at room temperature using specially designed and manufactured semiconductor lasers, thereby enabling a new generation of imagers, chemical/biological sensors, and ultra-broadband wireless communication systems.
The 2010 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering was presented to Gerhard Sessler and James West for the invention and development of the first practical electret microphone, which can inexpensively be made small enough to fit into cellular phones, digital cameras, and other portable devices.
The 2010 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Mechanical Engineering was presented to D. Brian Spalding for his seminal contributions to the computer modeling of fluid flow, creating the practice of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in industry, and paving the path for the widespread application of CFD to the design of objects from airplanes to heart valves.
The 2013 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Mechanical Engineering was presented to Subra Suresh for outstanding contributions to our understanding of the mechanical behavior of materials in applications ranging from large structures down to the atomic level. This research also showed how deformation of biological cells can be linked to human disease.
The 2010 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering was presented to Gerhard Sessler and James West for the invention and development of the first practical electret microphone, which can inexpensively be made small enough to fit into cellular phones, digital cameras, and other portable devices.
Environmental Science
The 2011 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Earth and Environmental Science was presented to Jillian Banfield for discovering the underlying principles of mineral formation and alteration by microbes, which are critical to understanding the form, composition, and distribution of minerals in the presence of living organisms.
Health Sciences
The 2016 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Mechanical Engineering was awarded to Shu Chien for contributions to the understanding of the physics of blood flow, and for applying this knowledge to better diagnose cardiovascular disease.
The 2010 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science was presented to Peter Nowell for the discovery that alterations to chromosomes can cause cancer, and further research leading to the development of a therapy that now cures 95% of individuals with chronic myelogenous leukemia.
Mathematics
The 2011 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering was presented to Ingrid Daubechies for fundamental discoveries in the field of compact representations of data, leading to efficient image compression as used in digital photography.
Physics
The 2011 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics was presented to Nicola Cabibbo for his fundamental insight into the process by which elementary particles decay through the weak interaction.
The 2010 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics was presented to J. Ignacio Cirac, David Wineland, and Peter Zoller for their theoretical proposal and experimental realization of the first device that performs elementary computer-logic operations using the quantum properties of individual atoms.
The 2017 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics was presented to Marvin L. Cohen for making possible atomic-scale calculations of the properties of materials so detailed that new materials and their mechanical, thermal, electrical, and optical properties can be predicted in agreement with experiments.
The 2013 Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science was presented to Kenichi Iga for the conception and development of the vertical cavity surface emitting laser and its multiple applications to optoelectronics.
The 2015 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics was awarded to Charles L. Kane, Eugene J. Mele, and Shoucheng Zhang for their groundbreaking theoretical contributions leading to the discovery of a new class of materials called topological insulators, and for their prediction of specific compounds exhibiting the novel properties expected of these new materials.
The 2014 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics was awarded to Daniel Kleppner for many pioneering contributions to discoveries of novel quantum phenomena involving the interaction of atoms with electromagnetic fields and the behavior of atoms at ultra-low temperatures.
The 2015 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics was awarded to Charles L. Kane, Eugene J. Mele, and Shoucheng Zhang for their groundbreaking theoretical contributions leading to the discovery of a new class of materials called topological insulators, and for their prediction of specific compounds exhibiting the novel properties expected of these new materials.
The 2018 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics was presented to Helen Rhoda Quinn for her pioneering contributions to the long-term quest for a unified theory of the strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions of fundamental particles.
The 2010 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics was presented to J. Ignacio Cirac, David Wineland, and Peter Zoller for their theoretical proposal and experimental realization of the first device that performs elementary computer-logic operations using the quantum properties of individual atoms.
The 2015 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics was awarded to Charles L. Kane, Eugene J. Mele, and Shoucheng Zhang for their groundbreaking theoretical contributions leading to the discovery of a new class of materials called topological insulators, and for their prediction of specific compounds exhibiting the novel properties expected of these new materials.
The 2010 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics was presented to J. Ignacio Cirac, David Wineland, and Peter Zoller for their theoretical proposal and experimental realization of the first device that performs elementary computer-logic operations using the quantum properties of individual atoms.
Psychiatry & Psychology
The 2011 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science was presented to John Anderson for the development of the first large-scale computational theory of the process by which humans perceive, learn and reason, and its application to computer tutoring systems.
The 2013 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science was presented to William Labov for establishing the cognitive basis of language variation and change through rigorous analysis of linguistic data, and for the study of non-standard dialects with significant social and cultural implications.
The 2015 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science was presented to Elissa L. Newport for her contributions to understanding the nature of human language, including the acquisition of spoken and visual language in both typically developing children and those developing in atypical environments; to characterizing critical periods for language learning; and to improving methods for language recovery after damage to the brain.
The 2017 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science was presented to Michael I. Posner for his central role in establishing the fields of cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience, thus increasing understanding of the human mind and brain through the pioneering use of reaction times and brain imaging in rigorous analyses to characterize attention, individual differences in attention, and both typical and atypical attentional development.
