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Keith Hodgson Elected to the National Academy of Sciences

(Photo)
(Photo by Diana Rogers.)

SLAC Associate Laboratory Director for Photon Science and Chief Research Officer Keith Hodgson, who also serves Stanford University as the David Mulvane Ehrsam and Edward Curtis Franklin Professor of Chemistry and as Professor of Photon Science at SLAC, has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He joins 71 other new members—including seven others from Stanford—and 18 foreign associates, the NAS announced yesterday.

"I was thrilled to hear of Keith's election to the National Academy of Sciences," said Persis Drell, director of SLAC. "He has made major contributions to our use of high-intensity synchrotron radiation for diffraction studies of proteins, as well as phasing by anomalous scattering methods," a technique used to recover vital information lost during the process of X-ray diffraction. "This is a well-deserved honor."

Hodgson has been involved with SLAC in various capacities since 1973. As one of the first users of the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (then called the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Project), he and his students did pioneering work in both the use of synchrotron X-rays to determine the crystal structures of proteins and the development of X-ray absorption spectroscopy to study biological and chemical systems. Since then he has published extensively on X-ray spectroscopic and crystallographic techniques, as well as using those and other techniques to further the study of a large range of biological, bioinorganic and inorganic systems. Hodgson served as SSRL Director from 1998 until 2005, helping realize both SPEAR3, a major upgrade to the venerable synchrotron light source facility, and the genesis of the Linac Coherent Light Source, the world's first hard X-ray laser and the next generation in light source technology.

Hodgson received the E.O. Lawrence Award from the Department of Energy in 2002 and was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2006. He is also a member of several scientific societies and has been active in national scientific policy, including chairing the DOE Biological and Environmental Research Advisory Committee from 1995 to 2005. Hodgson earned his BS from the University of Virginia in 1969 and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1972, and then joined Stanford as Assistant Professor of Chemistry in 1973.

—Lori Ann White
  SLAC Today, May 4, 2011