Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov was a Soviet physicist and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, which he was awarded in 1975 for emphasizing the human rights around the world.
Leo Szilard was a Hungarian-German-American physicist and inventor. He conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, patented the idea in 1936, and in late 1939 wrote the letter for Albert Einstein's signature that resulted in the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb.
Yuri Fyodorovich Orlov was a particle accelerator physicist, human rights activist, Soviet dissident, founder of the Moscow Helsinki Group, a founding member of the Soviet Amnesty International group, and Professor of Physics at Cornell University. He was declared a prisoner of conscience while serving nine years in prison and internal exile for monitoring the Helsinki human rights accords as a founder of the human rights movement in the Soviet Union.
Wolfgang Kurt Hermann "Pief" Panofsky, was a German-American physicist who won many awards including the National Medal of Science.
Ashok Gadgil Is the Andrew and Virginia Rudd Family Foundation Distinguished Chair and Professor of Safe Water and Sanitation at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Faculty Senior Scientist and has served as director of the Energy and Environmental Technologies Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Spencer R. Weart is the former director of the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics (AIP) from 1971 until his retirement in 2009.
The Andrei Sakharov Prize is a prize that is to be awarded every second year by the American Physical Society since 2006. The recipients are chosen for "outstanding leadership and/or achievements of scientists in upholding human rights". The prize is named after Andrei Sakharov (1921-1989), Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident and human rights activist; since 2007 it has been valued at $10,000.
Frank N. von Hippel is an American physicist. He is Professor and Co-Director of Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University and the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.
Kurt Gottfried was an Austrian-born American physicist who was professor emeritus of physics at Cornell University. He was known for his work in the areas of quantum mechanics and particle physics and was also a co-founder with Henry Way Kendall of the Union of Concerned Scientists. He wrote extensively in the areas of physics and arms control.
Harry Eugene Stanley is an American physicist and University Professor at Boston University. He has made seminal contributions to statistical physics and is one of the pioneers of interdisciplinary science. His current research focuses on understanding the anomalous behavior of liquid water, but he had made fundamental contributions to complex systems, such as quantifying correlations among the constituents of the Alzheimer brain, and quantifying fluctuations in noncoding and coding DNA sequences, interbeat intervals of the healthy and diseased heart. He is one of the founding fathers of econophysics.
Xu Liangying was a Chinese physicist, translator and a historian and philosopher of natural science.
The David Adler Lectureship Award in the Field of Materials Physics is a prize that has been awarded annually by the American Physical Society since 1988. The recipient is chosen for "an outstanding contributor to the field of materials physics, who is noted for the quality of his/her research, review articles and lecturing." The prize is named after physicist David Adler with contributions to the endowment by friends of David Adler and major support from Energy Conversion Devices, Inc., as well as support from the American Physical Society's Division of Materials Physics. The prize includes a $5,000 honorarium.
Omid Kokabee is an Iranian experimental laser physicist at the University of Texas at Austin who was arrested in Iran after returning from the United States to visit his family on January 30, 2011. He was initially charged with "gathering and colluding against national security." Still, later, after being acquitted of the primary charges, he was put on trial for “communicating with a hostile government (USA)” and “illegitimate/illegal earnings”. Even though he repeatedly denied all charges against himself, he was finally sentenced to ten years in prison.
Mulugeta Bekele is an Ethiopian scientist and academic. He is an associate Professor of Physics at Addis Ababa University (AAU), Ethiopia. He completed his PhD in Physics at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India in 1997. He has been awarded the Andrei Sakharov Prize by the American Physical Society (APS) "For tireless efforts in defense of human rights and freedom of expression and education anywhere in the world, and for inspiring students, colleagues and others to do the same." He is the president of Ethiopian Physical Society since October 1998 and an Associate Member of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy since May 1999.
Edwin S. Lyman is a physicist and the Director of Nuclear Power Safety with the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). He specializes in nuclear proliferation, nuclear terrorism, and nuclear power safety.
Robert Harry Socolow is an American theoretical physicist and professor emeritus of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University.
Viktor Borisovich Adamskyk.N was a Russian physicist of Ukrainian origin known for his work on the former Soviet program of nuclear weapons.
Karin M. Rabe is an American condensed matter and computational materials physicist known for her studies of materials near phase transitions, including ferroelectrics, multiferroics, and martensites. She also works on the theoretical design of new materials. She is a distinguished professor and Board of Governors Professor of Physics at Rutgers University.
Maury Tigner is an American physicist working on particle accelerators and experimental particle physics.
