Professor H. Gordon Berry has been named as an Outstanding Referee by the American Physical Society for 2011. The American Physical Society initiated the highly selective award program in 2008 to recognize scientists who have been exceptionally helpful in assessing manuscripts for publication in the APS journals. The selection of Outstanding Referees was made based on over two decades of database records on over 50,000 referees (some no longer in active service) who have been called upon to review manuscripts, of which over 35,000 were submitted in 2010. The basis for selection was the quality, number and timeliness of their reports, without regard for membership in the APS, country of origin, or field of research. This year 144 Outstanding Referees received this honor.
Like Fellowship in the APS and other organizations, this is a lifetime award. In initiating the program, APS expresses appreciation to all referees, whose efforts in peer review not only keep the standards of the journals at a high level, but in many cases also help authors to improve the quality and readability of their articles—even those that are not published by APS.
Additional Department of Physics faculty who have received this honor are Neal Cason, Jacek Furdyna, Walter Johnson, and James Kolata. The full list of recipients can be found on the APS website (http://publish.aps.org/OutstandingReferees).