The 2001 Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society Radiation Instrumentation Outstanding Achievement Award was presented to Stephen E. Derenzo of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) on November 6th at the IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium held in San Diego, California. The citation reads œFor research and teaching related to scintillators and scintillation detectors, including development of scintillators, theoretical understanding of scintillation processes, pioneering work in the readout of scintillators, and teaching other professionals through the Short Courses.” This bi-annual award honors outstanding technical contributions to the field of Radiation Instrumentation. The award includes a plaque, certificate, and a check for $2000.

This is the first time that this award has been given, and we are particularly pleased that it should go to a person with such a long history of significant fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of radiation detection instrumentation. Stephen E. Derenzo received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in physics from the University of Chicago in 1963, 1965, and 1968. Upon graduation he joined LBNL, and has been employed there since. He was promoted to Senior Scientist at LBNL in 1982, Professor-In-Residence on the UC Berkeley campus in 1988, and leads the Instrumentation Group of the Department of Nuclear Medicine and Functional Imaging at LBNL. He attended his first IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium 1971 (and has missed very few since then), received the IEEE NPSS Merit Award in 1992, and was elected IEEE Fellow in 2000. He has taught the scintillator portion of Glenn Knoll's Radiation Detection and Measurement Short Course 16 times —10 of these at IEEE meetings.

His research career includes fundamental contributions to many different radiation detection technologies. Starting in 1969, he developed the liquid-xenon-filled proportional wire chamber with Luis Alvarez, Richard Muller, and Haim Zaklad. In 1973 he used this device with Thomas Budinger to image radioactive isotopes in animals. For the next ten years he worked mainly with inorganic scintillators and photomultiplier tubes, exploring the limits of sensitivity, data rates, and spatial resolution in positron emission tomography (PET) and participated with Thomas Budinger and Ronald Huesman in the construction of two positron tomographs. The first was completed in 1978 and the second, which was completed in 1986, can image the human brain with a spatial resolution finer than any other tomograph (2.6 mm fwhm).

In 1984 he pioneered the use of cooled low-noise silicon photodiodes (coupled to inorganic scintillators) for gamma ray spectroscopy, achieving an energy resolution of 7.2% fwhm for 662 keV photon interactions in BGO (Bi4Ge3O12). This made possible the development of a high resolution detector for PET that could measure the depth of interaction in the crystal and overcome one of the primary limitations to spatial resolution in PET. This detector concept is being applied with co-workers William Moses, Jennifer Huber, and Seng Choong to new instruments for breast and small animal imaging, and for imaging the human brain.

More recently his research has turned to scintillator development and the fundamental properties of scintillators, developing apparatus to rapidly characterize the scintillation properties of samples as well as quantum mechanical computation strategies to predict scintillation. One of his primary future goals is the development of a scintillator for PET that not only has excellent stopping power and high luminosity, but also has a timing accuracy sufficient to permit the localization of the annihilation point in space by the time difference of the coincident photons. To this end he is working with Marvin Weber and William Moses to characterize the processes that occur in known scintillators and to develop a new class of scintillators based on near-band edge emission in semiconductors that would be brighter and hundreds of times faster than currently available scintillators.

Dr. Derenzo is the author or co-author of over 150 scientific papers and holds 5 patents. He is a member of the IEEE and APS.

Dr. Derenzo can be reached at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 1 Cyclotron Road, Mailstop 55-121, Berkeley, CA 94720; Phone: +1 510 486-4097; Fax: +1 510 486-4768; E-mail: sederenzo@lbl.gov. This article was prepared by Bill Moses who is at the same mailing address as Dr. Derenzo at LBL; Phone: +1 510 486-4432; Fax: +1 510 486-4768;E-mail: wwmoses@lbl.go