University of California, Santa Barbara

Carolyn Widney "Carol" Greider is an American molecular biologist. She is Daniel Nathans Professor and Director of Molecular Biology and Genetics at... Johns Hopkins University. She discovered the enzyme telomerase in 1984, when she was a graduate student of Elizabeth Blackburn at the University of California, Berkeley. Greider pioneered research on the structure of telomeres, the ends of the chromosomes. She was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, along with Blackburn and Jack W. Szostak, for their discovery that telomeres are protected from progressive shortening by the enzyme telomerase. Greider was born in San Diego, California. Her father, Kenneth Greider, was a physics professor. Her family moved from San Diego to Davis, California, where she spent many of her early years and graduated from Davis Senior High School in 1979. She graduated from the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a B.A. in biology in 1983. During this time she also studied at the University of Göttingen and made significant discoveries there. She completed her Ph.D.
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Gwyneth Kate Paltrow is an American actress and singer. She made her acting debut on stage in 1990 and started appearing in films in 1991. After... appearing in several films throughout the decade, Paltrow gained early notice for her work in films such as Seven and Emma . Following the films Sliding Doors and A Perfect Murder , Paltrow garnered worldwide recognition through her performance in Shakespeare in Love , for which she won an Academy Award for Best Actress, a Golden Globe Award and two Screen Actors Guild Awards, for Outstanding Lead Actress and as a member of the Outstanding Cast. She also won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series in 2011 for her role as Holly Holliday on the Fox hit TV show Glee in the episode "The Substitute". Paltrow has portrayed supporting as well as lead roles in films such as The Talented Mr. Ripley , Shallow Hal , and Proof , for which she earned a Golden Globe nomination as Best Actress in Motion Picture Drama.
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Bob Yari is an Iranian-American film producer. He grew up in New York City, and studied cinematography at the University of California, Santa... Barbara. Yari's film Crash won the Best Picture at the 78th Academy Awards. Although Yari received screen credit as a producer of Crash, the Producers Guild of America refused to designate him as a producer to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the purpose of nominating producers of the film for the Best Picture Oscar. Yari sued both the Academy and the Guild in the Los Angeles Superior Court and lost at the demurrer stage. The trial court's decision was affirmed by the California Court of Appeal for the Second Appellate District on March 25, 2008.
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Richard K. Nelson is a cultural anthropologist and writer whose work has focused primarily on the indigenous cultures of Alaska and, more generally,... the relationships between people and nature. He is the host to a public radio series called Encounters aired nationally. Nelson was born and raised in Wisconsin, attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and received his Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He lived for extended periods in Athabaskan and Alaskan Eskimo villages, experiences which inspired his earliest works, including Hunters of the Northern Ice, Hunters of the Northern Forests, Shadow of the Hunter, and The Athabaskans. With his book Make Prayers to the Raven about the Koyukon people of Alaska's boreal forest, Nelson moved from anthropological studies to a more literary style. The book was the basis for a five-part public television series, for which Nelson served as writer and associate producer. Nelson's next book, The Island Within, won the John Burroughs Medal for distinguished natural history writing.
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Alan Jay Heeger is an American physicist, academic and Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry. Heeger was born in Sioux City, Iowa to a Jewish family. He... earned a B.S. in physics and mathematics from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1957, and a Ph.D in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1961. From 1962 to 1982 he was on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania. In 1982 he commenced his present appointment as a professor in the Physics Department and the Materials Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research has led to the formation of numerous start-up companies including Uniax, Konarka, and Sirigen, founded in 2003 by Guillermo C. Bazan, Patrick J. Dietzen, Brent S. Gaylord. Alan Heeger was a founder of Uniax, which was acquired by DuPont. He won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2000 along with Alan G. MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa "for their discovery and development of conductive polymers;" he had won the Oliver E. Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society in 1983 and, in 1995, the Balzan Prize for Science of Non-Biological Materials.
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Finn Erling Kydland is a Norwegian economist. He is currently the Henley Professor of Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He... also holds the Richard P. Simmons Distinguished Professorship at the Tepper School of Business of Carnegie Mellon University, where he earned his Ph.D., and a part-time position at the Norwegian School of Economics . Kydland was a co-recipient of the 2004 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics , "for their contributions to dynamic macroeconomics: the time consistency of economic policy and the driving forces behind business cycles". Kydland grew up as the eldest of six siblings at the family farm in Søyland, Gjesdal, which is located in the Jæren farming region in Rogaland county, southwestern Norway. He recalls having had a liberal upbringing, his parents not imposing many limitations on their children. Finn Kydland became interested in mathematics and economics as a young adult, after he did some bookkeeping at a friend's mink farm. With a freshly awakened interest in theoretical economics, Kydland earned a BSc from NHH in 1968 and a Ph.D.
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Walter Kohn is an Austrian-born American theoretical physicist. He was awarded, with John Pople, the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1998. The award... recognized their contributions to the understandings of the electronic properties of materials. In particular, Kohn played the leading role in the development of density functional theory, which made it possible to incorporate quantum mechanical effects in the electronic density . This computational simplification led to many insights and became an essential tool for electronic materials, atomic and molecular structure. Kohn arrived in England as part of the famous Kindertransport rescue operation, immediately after the annexation of Austria by Hitler. He is from a Jewish family, both of his parents were later killed in the Holocaust. Because he was a German national, he was sent to Canada by the English in July 1940. As a 17-year-old, Kohn traveled as part of a British convoy moving through U-boat-infested waters to Quebec City in Canada; and from there, by train, to a camp in Trois-Rivières.
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Herbert Kroemer , a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, received his Ph.D. in... theoretical physics in 1952 from the University of Göttingen, Germany, with a dissertation on hot electron effects in the then-new transistor, setting the stage for a career in research on the physics of semiconductor devices. In 2000, Dr. Kroemer, along with Zhores I. Alferov, was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics "for developing semiconductor heterostructures used in high-speed- and opto-electronics". The other co-recipient of the Nobel Prize was Jack Kilby for his invention and development of integrated circuits and micro-chips. He had an early success in a rather different subject, when together with Burgess and Houston in 1953, he detected a mathematical error in Nordheim's theory of electron tunneling through the image-force rounded barrier used in the theory of field electron emission. Between them, they generated tables of correction-factor values that are still in use over 50 years later.
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