CRPC AWARDS AND HONORS

President Clinton has announced his nomination of Richard Tapia, CRPC Director of Human Resources and Education, to the National Science Board (NSB). The NSB is the governing body of the National Science Foundation and has 24 members who are appointed by the president with the advice and consent of the Senate. Members serve six-year rotating terms, and eight members are appointed every two years. NSB members recommend broad national policies for promoting basic research and education in the sciences and engineering. Tapia is one of three nominees Clinton announced on August 2.

Tapia has also been named the 1996 Hispanic Engineer of the Year by Hispanic Engineer Magazine. He was selected from 225 national nominees and is the first academician to receive this honor. Tapia will accept his award at the Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Awards Conference (HENAAC), to be held in Houston on October 12, 1996.

Tapia was recognized for his leadership, career accomplishments, and extensive work to encourage Hispanics in math and science. Among the many people he has worked with are elementary school teacher and CRPC participant Lucille Barrera, CRPC External Advisory Committee emeritus member Israel Galvan, and Rice graduate student Monica L. Martinez. Barrera recently won a 1996 HENAAC award in the category "Education, K- 12." She established the "Scientist of the Month" program at her school, in which students meet and learn about underrepresented minority and female scientists. Galvan has won the 1996 HENAAC "Entrepreneur of the Year" award. He is founder, president, and CEO of GHG Corporation, a company that designs new technology for use in space and provides engineering, training, networking, and programming support. The company has grown from three employees in 1977 to more than 215 employees and $12 million in revenues. Galvan has participated in Tapia's CRPC outreach programs for teachers and underrepresented minorities. Martinez has been very active in the Tapia-directed "Spend a Summer with a Scientist" program, currently conducts research on shallow water equations at the Center for Subsurface Modeling led by CRPC researcher Mary Wheeler at the University of Texas, and won the 1995 HENAAC honor for Student Leadership.

CRPC Executive Committee member K. Mani Chandy, graduate students Adam Rifkin and Paulo A. G. Sivilotti, and undergraduate students Jacob Mandelson, Mathew Richardson, Wesley Tanaka, and Luke Weisman of the California Institute of Technology have won the best paper award in the area of High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC) Software for "Distributed System Using Java and the Internet." The award was presented at the fifth IEEE International Symposium on HPDC (HPDC-5), held August 6 through 9 at the ONCenter in Syracuse.

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