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National Medal of Science ceremony streamed live from White House Nov. 20

By Robert Sanders

President Barack Obama will honor three UC Berkeley faculty members on Thursday, Nov. 20, at a White House ceremony for the 19 new winners of the National Medals of Science and National Medals of Technology & Innovation.

Klinman

Judith Klinman, professor emerita of chemistry and recipient of the 2015 National Medal of Science.

The public can watch the ceremony streamed live through the web from the East Room, starting at 8:30 a.m. Pacific Time, at www.whitehouse.gov/live.

The campus’s three new medalists are Judith Klinman, professor emerita of chemistry, Alexandre Chorin, University Professor emeritus of mathematics, and the late David Blackwell, a statistician who died in 2010. The medal recipients were announced by the White House on Oct. 3.

Klinman is an expert on enzyme catalysis, often using isotope tracers to uncover the chemical steps involved in protein activity in the body. Chorin, who also is a Senior Faculty Scientist in the Mathematics Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, introduced powerful new computational methods for the solution of problems in fluid mechanics, covering the spectrum from practical software to rigorous error bounds.

Blackwell, the first African American admitted to the National Academy of Sciences and the first tenured black professor in UC Berkeley history, was a mathematician and statistician who contributed to numerous fields, including probability theory, game theory and information theory.