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 (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 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1965 to 2000, but has since been replaced by more modern hardware.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.