The Lew Allen Award for Excellence was created to recognize and encourage significant individual accomplishments or leadership in scientific research or technological innovation by JPL employees during the early years of their professional careers.

The award consists of a wall plaque and an award of $25,000 from the JPL Research and Technology Development Fund (R&TD) to be used at JPL to enhance the professional efforts of the awardee. The award is to be used at JPL in a manner consistent with the objectives and fiscal year constraints of the R&TD.

The 2008 winners of this award were:

* Hui Su (Ph.D. 1998): Hui was selected for major advances in the understanding of water vapor and cloud feedbacks on climate change through quantitative analyses of relationships between upper tropospheric humidity, clouds, and sea surface temperature using satellite remote sensing data, meteorological analyses, and general circulation and radiative transfer models.

* Ioannis Mikellides (Ph.D. 1999): Ioannis was selected for the development of outstanding computational models of the plasma physics in electric propulsion hollow cathodes, and of their major wear mechanisms, which have excelled JPL to the forefront of Electric Propulsion Life Modeling worldwide.

* Pekka Kangaslahti (Ph.D. 1999): Pekka was selected for demonstrating world leadership in the fields of monolithic microwave integrated circuit design and millimeter-wave component development, capabilities which enable new missions in Earth Science, Astrophysics and Planetary Exploration.

* Kiri L. Wagstaff (Ph.D. 2002): Kiri was chosen for advancing the performance and application of machine learning methods to onboard and ground-based space science, Earth science and spacecraft engineering.

To learn more about the Lew Allen Award and past recipients, click here.