WHOI Scientist Honored by Russian Academy of Sciences

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October 22, 2002

A local scientist has been honored by the Russian Academy of Sciences. Assistant Scientist Steve Jayne of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution was presented the 2002 Zeldovich Award by the Committee on Space Research and the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The award is named for the late Russian physicist Yakov Zeldovich and is presented to young scientists who have demonstrated excellence and achievement in their field of scientific research. Jayne’s award citation reads in part: “for outstanding contributions to ocean sciences using satellite observations to determine the time-varying global heat transport, deep ocean currents and ocean bathymetry.”

Yakov B. Zeldovich was a distinguished Russian astrophysicist whose contributions to modern astronomy and the birth and early history of the universe gained worldwide attention. Born in 1914, he was educated at the Institute of Physics and Technology in Leningrad and the Institute of Chemical Physics, where he rose to the level of Academician. He had a broad range of scientific interests and made many contributions to developments in the theory of combustion and detonation, the physics of explosions and shock waves, nuclear and elementary particle physics, gravitation theory, cosmology, high energy astrophysics and x-ray astronomy. According to an article published in 1988, shortly after his death, Zeldovich was one of the first to point out that the discovery of the cosmic microwave background offered us a powerful tool for probing the early history of the universe. Prior to his death in 1987 he dedicated much of his time to the study of the birth of the universe and its early evolution.

Steve Jayne received his S.B. degree in Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences from MIT in 1994 and his Sc.D. in Oceanography from the MIT/WHOI Joint Graduate Program in Oceanography and Applied Ocean Sciences and Engineering in 1999. He was a postdoctoral research associate at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and the Department of Physics at the University of Colorado; and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, from 1999 to 2001.

Jayne was appointed an assistant scientist at WHOI in September 2001. His research interests include developing statistical estimation techniques to map ocean velocity and heat content, developing new remote sensing techniques, and using ocean circulation models to understand the western boundary currents, eddies and gyres in the ocean. He was recently named an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator for 2003 for his work in modeling ocean circulation.

Jayne received the Zeldovich Award at a ceremony at the COSPAR meeting (the World Space Congress) in Houston, Texas, in October 2002.