Tampa, FL (PRWEB) May 16, 2014
Tampas Museum of Science & Industry, along with presenting sponsor Bright House Networks, has chosen their 2014 honoree for the National Hispanic Scientist of the Year, Dr. Rafael Bras, Civil Engineer and Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at Georgia Tech. In addition, MOSI is pleased to announce that it has expanded the event with the addition of a new Early Career award. The inaugural recipient is Dr. Ana Maria Rey, a physicist and assistant research professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Dr. Bras diverse areas of expertise include environmental engineering and managing water resources. He has served as the Chair of the MIT faculty, an elected fellow of multiple prestigious academies including AGU, ACSE, AMS and AAAS, worked with NASA, and he chairs a panel of experts that supervises the design and construction of a multi-billion dollar project to protect the City of Venice from floods. In 1997, Bras was named one of the top 100 most influential Hispanics by Hispanic Business and, in 2013, he was named to the US Dept. of Energy Advisory Board.
Bras, a native of Puerto Rico, studied at MIT where he received a bachelor’s (1972) and master’s degree (1974) in Civil Engineering, and a science doctorate in Water Resources and Hydrology (1975). On completion of his doctorate, he worked for a time as an assistant professor at the University of Puerto Rico’s School of Engineering, and performed some consulting work on the island. He returned to MIT in July 1976, where he has served for more than 32 years as a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and held an appointment in the Departments of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. He is a past chair of the MIT faculty, former head of the Civil and Environmental Engineering department, and director of the Ralph M. Parsons Laboratory at MIT.
Our 2014 Early Career National Hispanic Scientist of the Year recipient, Dr. Ana Maria Rey, is a Columbian physicist at the University of Colorado, Boulder who “studies the scientific interface between atomic, molecular and optical physics, condensed matter physics and quantum information science.” As an outstanding scientist, among her many scientific accolades, she has been awarded a 2013 MacArthur Fellowship and a 2013 Presidential Early Career award. Rey earned her B.S. at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogot
