The 2011 Benjamin Franklin medal in engineering presented to Dean Kamen

Dean Kamen was chosen for a Benjamin Franklin Medal for his resourcefulness and imagination in creating inventions that are assisting disabled and handicapped people to improve their quality of life and health.     

The 2001 Benjamin Franklin medal in chemistry presented to K. Barry Sharpless

The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, PA awarded the 2001 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Chemistry to K. Barry Sharpless for his important innovative scientific contributions to the field of asymmetric catalytic oxidation, which resulted in highly enantioselective processes for the epoxidation, dihydroxylation and aminohydroxylation of olefins.     

The 2008 Benjamin Franklin medal for physics is presented to Dr. Deborah Jin

The Benjamin Franklin Medal for Physics is awarded to Dr. Deborah Jin (JILA, NIST and the University of Colorado) “in recognition of her pioneering investigations into the quantum properties of an ultra-cold gas of fermionic atoms and, in particular, for her creation of the first degenerate Fermi gas of atoms”.     

The 2005 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering presented to Andrew Viterbi

The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, PA, awarded the 2005 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering to Andrew Viterbi for developing an efficient technique that has advanced the design and implementation of modern space and wireless communication systems. He also was a leader in the development of Code Division Multiple Access wireless technologies.     

Neutrino oscillations: The 2007 Benjamin Franklin medal in physics presented to Arthur McDonald and Yoji Totsuka

This award recognizes two specific discoveries that constitute the experimental discovery of neutrino oscillations. In 1998 the Super-Kamiokande group under the leadership of Yoji Totsuka published their paper, “Evidence for Oscillation of Atmospheric Neutrinos” in Physical Review Letters [1]. The paper describes a deficit of muon-type neutrinos from below the detector relative to those from above. It explains this “atmospheric neutrino anomaly” as a result of transformation of some of the muon neutrinos into another type of neutrino. Four years later, the group led by Arthur McDonald described “Direct Evidence for Neutrino Flavor Transformation from Neutral-Current Interactions in the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory” [2] in the same journal. This experiment detected lower energy neutrinos from deep inside the Sun. By measuring all flavors of neutrinos with large rates, the SNO collaboration showed definitively that the long-standing “solar neutrino puzzle” was another manifestation of neutrino oscillations. As a result of these two experiments, we now understand that neutrinos can change identities during propagation and that both the solar and atmospheric neutrino “problems” result from the same underlying phenomenon of oscillations. A consequence of neutrino oscillations is that neutrinos, previously thought to be massless, must have a non-zero rest mass.     

Sequence stratigraphy and the world sea-level curve: The 2005 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Earth and Environmental Science awarded to Peter R. Vail

During the mid-1960s, Peter R. Vail at Exxon Production Research Co. led a group working with the new, greatly improved generation of multifold seismic reflection data being shot along the continental margins of the world. The work of this group, inspired by Vail, brought the worlds of stratigraphy and seismic interpretation together in developing the original concepts of seismic stratigraphy.Later these concepts were applied by Vail and his co-workers to well logs, cores, and outcrops, broadening seismic stratigraphy into what is known today as sequence stratigraphy. Using these data the group was documenting and interpreting large-scale, basin-wide depositional patterns, stratal configurations, and unconformities in basins around the world. They proposed a chronology of global sea-level fluctuation as a framework for global correlation, resulting in a world sea-level curve. This further led to a new eustatic sea-level model. The results of these studies impacted on many scientific disciplines, but its implications for the petroleum industry have been extensive.A review of 19th- and 20th-Century stratigraphic thought on unconformities and unconformity-bounded stratal units suggests that Peter Vail followed in the footsteps of the eminent stratigraphers Charles Lyell, T. C. Chamberlain, and L. L. Sloss, his former teacher.For his contributions to sequence stratigraphy and the world sea-level curve, Peter R. Vail was awarded the 2005 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Earth and Environmental Science.     

The 2005 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science presented to Aravind Joshi

The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, awarded the 2005 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science to Aravind Joshi for his fundamental contributions to natural language processing technology and to cognitive science, including particularly the development of the Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG) family of formalisms and tractable polynomial time algorithms that analyze the complex, varied surface word orders of human languages while simultaneously recovering local elementary syntactic domains corresponding to meaning. In addition, Joshi has been a major collaborator on a new theory of discourse coherence that has influenced all subsequent work on anaphora resolution, and is currently applying TAG to address modeling problems in the life sciences.     

The 2007 Benjamin Franklin medal in electrical engineering presented to Robert H. Dennard, Ph.D.

For inventing the 1-transistor/1-capacitor dynamic random access memory that significantly reduced the cost of memory, and for contributing to the development of the metal oxide semiconductor scaling principle that guides the design of increasingly small and complex integrated circuits.     

The 2001 Benjamin Franklin medal in physics presented to Alan Guth, Ph.D. of Cambridge, Massachusetts

The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, awarded the 2001 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics to Alan H. Guth for his efforts to advance our knowledge of physical science and its application of the inflationary scenario, in which the universe undergoes a rapid expansion in the first stages of the Big Bang.     

The 2001 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Engineering presented to Bernard Widrow

The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Engineering to Bernard Widrow, Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, for pioneering work in adaptive signal processing. Adaptive systems have the ability to learn and improve their behavior through interaction with their environments. Dr. Widrow developed the least mean squared (LMS) algorithm, which is a computationally facile means of finding the optimal weight vector for suppressing unknown noise. For example, every high-speed modem contains an adaptive filter or automatic equalizer based on the Widrow-Hoff LMS algorithm. Such a telephone channel equalizer makes it possible for computers to communicate at high speed (such as for the internet) over regular telephone lines, which were never intended for this purpose. Dr. Widrow was amongst the first to publish a general theory of adaptive antennas, including space-time processing. His adaptive learning algorithms made artificial neural networks possible. His latest invention is a directional hearing aid.     

The Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science presented to Judah Folkman

The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania awarded the 2001 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science to Judah Folkman for his founding of the field of angiogenesis research and demonstration that angiogenesis is a necessary factor in the conversion of abnormal cells to malignant tumors.     

The 2004 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Mechanical Engineering presented to Roger Bacon

The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, PA, awarded the 2004 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Mechanical Engineering to Roger Bacon for his fundamental research on the production of graphite whiskers and the determination of their microstructure and properties, for his pioneering development efforts in the production of the world's first continuously processed carbon fibers and the world's first high modulus and high-strength carbon fibers, and for his contributions to the development of carbon fibers from alternative starting materials.     

The 2010 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science presented to Peter C. Nowell

Peter Nowell is known for his discovery that a small terminal deletion on chromosome 22 is a consistent feature in leukemic cells from chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) patients. This was the first direct evidence that a human cancer could be the result of a somatic (chromosomal) mutation, and paved the way for the development of a therapy that now cures 95% of individuals with CML.