Jack Wolf One of Five at UCSD Named Fellows of American Academy of Arts & Sciences

April 28, 2005 / By Doug Ramsey

San Diego, CA, April 28, 2005 -- A Calit2-affiliated expert in digital information storage and signal processing for digital recording is one of five UCSD faculty members named fellows of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Jacobs School of Engineering electrical and computer engineering professor Jack Keil Wolf is one of 196 new fellows and 17 new foreign honorary members to be inducted next October 8 at the 225-year-old academy's Cambridge, MA, headquarters.

Jack Wolf

Wolf and the other new fellows from UCSD represent a diverse array of disciplines. Ajit P. Varki directs the Glycobiology Research and Training Center; Linda Preiss Rothschild and M. Salah Baouendi are professors of mathematics; and Michael L. Norman is a professor of physics. They join 76 current Academy fellows on the UCSD faculty.

Fellows and members are nominated and elected by current members, comprising scholars and practitioners from mathematics, physics, biological sciences, humanities and the arts, public affairs and business. "It gives me great pleasure to welcome these outstanding leaders in their fields," said Academy President Patricia Meyer Spacks. "Fellows are selected through a highly competitive process that recognizes individuals who have made preeminent contributions to their disciplines and to society at large."

Jack Wolf is the Stephen O. Rice Professor of Magnetics and was the first chaired professor in UCSD's Center for Magnetic Recording Research. A member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the IEEE, Wolf received the IEEE's Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communication Award in 1998, and the IEEE Information Theory Society's Shannon Award in 2001. Winning the Richard W. Hamming Medal in 2004, Wolf was cited for "fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of information transmission and storage." He earned his Ph.D. in 1960 from Princeton University, and later taught at New York University, Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Wolf joined the UCSD faculty in 1984.

Wolf was an early proponent of applying information and communications theory to the construction of ultra-high-density information storage. The research results of Wolf and his students have been incorporated in the design of several storage systems.

Wolf organizes the annual Shannon Memorial Lecture series co-sponsored by Calit2; this year, it takes place on April 29, with Caltech professor Robert McEliece delivering a talk on "Are There Turbo-Codes on Mars?".

Founded in 1780 by John Adams, John Hancock and other scholar-patriots, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences has elected as fellows and honorary members the finest minds and most influential leaders from each generation, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin in the 18th century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 19th, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the 20th. The current membership includes more than 150 Nobel laureates and 50 Pulitzer Prize winners.

Media Contacts Media Contacts: Doug Ramsey, (858) 822-5825, dramsey@ucsd.edu or Paul Mueller, (858) 534-8564, pkmueller@ucsd.edu

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Jack Wolf One of Five at UCSD Named Fellows of American Academy of Arts & Sciences