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Caltech News Release
For Immediate Release
April 16, 2003

Caltech Names Distinguished Alumni

MEDIA CONTACT:  Jill Perry, Media Relations Director
               (626) 395-3226
              jperry{at}caltech.edu

PASADENA, Calif. - An author, an inventor, an astronomer, a Mars 
researcher, and a computer pioneer will all be honored at the 
California Institute of Technology Distinguished Alumni Awards at 11 
a.m. May 17 in Beckman Auditorium on the Caltech campus.

The Distinguished Alumni Award is the highest honor the Institute 
bestows upon an alumnus. It is in recognition of extraordinary 
achievement by Caltech graduates in business, community, and 
professional life. Nominations are made by a faculty and alumni 
committee and confirmed by the Board of Trustees. This award was 
initiated as a part of Caltech's 75th anniversary celebration in
1966.

The awards are presented at a ceremony during Caltech's Alumni 
Seminar Day. This annual event includes a variety of lectures and 
presentations to alumni and friends by Caltech faculty, researchers, 
and students.

The Distinguished Alumni are Fernando J. Corbat=F3 (BS '50, physics), 
James Edward Gunn (PhD '66, astronomy and physics), Michael W. 
Hunkapiller (PhD '74, chemistry), Alan Lightman (MS '73, PhD '74, 
physics), and Michael Malin (PhD '76, planetary science and geology).

Corbat=F3 is a professor emeritus in the electrical engineering and 
computer science department at MIT. He is known for his pioneering 
work on the design and development of multiple-access computer 
systems. He led the development of the Mutiplexed Information and 
Computing Service (Multics), the precursuor to today's Internet. At a 
time when computers were viewed as tools and toys for scientists, 
Multics was a radical idea to provide a reliable, powerful 
information resource for a large number of people 24 hours a day. 
The time-sharing operating system was in use around the world from 
1965 to 2000, but has since been replaced by more modern hardware.

James Edward Gunn is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Astronomy at 
Princeton University Observatory. He has worked as a scientist at JPL 
and taught at UC Berkeley, Caltech, the University of Washington, the 
University of Chicago, and Rice University.  He was a deputy 
principal investigator on the Wide Field/Planetary Camera on the 
Hubble Space Telescope, served as the associate director of the 
Apache Point Observatory, and is a MacArthur Fellow. He was also a 
project scientist and technical director for the Sloan Digital Sky 
Survey. His numerous awards and prizes include the Royal Astronomical 
Society's Gold Medal.

Michael W. Hunkapiller is a senior vice president of Applera 
Corporation and president of Applied Biosystems Group. He was an 
inventor of the DNA Sequencer, the technology developed at Caltech 
that allowed the Human Genome Project to map and sequence the 3 
billion base pairs of human DNA.  He has also pioneered the 
development of automated systems for the analysis, synthesis, and 
purification of proteins, peptides, and nucleic acids. He has more 
than 20 patents and has published more than 100 scientific papers. 
These systems are key components of modern molecular biology research 
laboratories as well as the cornerstone of such applications as 
forensic DNA typing. They are used in more than 10,000 labs worldwide 
and have played essential roles in many of the major biomedical 
discoveries and biotechnology developments in the last decade.

Alan Lightman is a physicist, novelist, and educator. After receiving 
his PhD in theoretical physics from Caltech in 1974, he taught 
astronomy and physics at Harvard. In 1989 he went to MIT with a joint 
appointment in physics and the humanities. His scientific research 
has been in the area of relativity and astrophysics. In the early 
1980s, Lightman began writing essays about the human dimensions of 
science. His essays and reviews have appeared in the Atlantic 
Monthly, Harper's, the New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books. 
He is the author of a dozen books, the most recent being the novels 
The Diagnosis, Good Benito, Einstein's Dreams, and the forthcoming 
Reunion, which will be available in July. In 1996, Lightman won the 
Gemant Prize of the American Institute of Physics for linking science 
with the humanities.

Michael Malin is president and chief scientist of Malin Space Science 
Systems, Inc., of San Diego. He is principal investigator on the Mars 
Global Surveyor Orbiter Camera and of the Mars Color Imager/Context 
Camera investigation on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to be 
launched in 2005. He has been the principal investigator for cameras 
and imaging systems on a number of significant missions. His recent 
research has focused on photogeological studies of Mars and the 
application of insights gained from terrestrial field work on eolian, 
fluvial, and mass movement phenomena in Alaska, Iceland, Hawaii, 
Mount St. Helens, and southern Utah, to martian studies. He received 
a MacArthur Fellowship in 1987, and the NASA Exceptional Scientific 
Achievement Medal in 2002.

The five recipients receive a medallion and a framed calligraphy 
certificate, and their names are placed on a plaque at the Caltech 
Alumni House.

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