SAN ANTONIO — December 18, 2024 —Southwest Research Institute Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Walt Downing, P.E., received the prestigious IEEE Members and Geographic Activities (MGA) Leadership Award, an international recognition, honoring “…individuals who have exhibited exemplary and substantive leadership of an extraordinary nature” in implementing IEEE member activities. Downing, an IEEE Life Member, has held various leadership positions over his decades of membership. He currently serves as IEEE Region 5 government activities coordinator, societies and councils liaison and chair of the Lone Star Section, representing Central and South Texas.

Ochsner Health Network, LLC (OHN), the region’s largest physician-led clinically integrated network, is pleased to report its 2023 – 2024 impact resulting from care delivered to over a half million patients living throughout the Gulf South.

Reported recently in a new study published in Nature, a team of researchers, led by JILA and NIST Fellow and University of Colorado Boulder Physics professor Jun Ye, in collaboration with Professor Eric Hudson’s team at UCLA’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, have found a way to make nuclear clocks a thousand times less radioactive and more cost-effective, thanks to a method creating thin films of thorium tetrafluoride (ThF₄).

MIT physicists have created a new and long-lasting magnetic state in a material, using only light. The results provide a new way to control and switch antiferromagnetic materials, which are of interest for their potential to advance information processing and memory chip technology.