Daily News Briefs

President George W. Bush presented 2003 National Medal of Science and National Medal of Technology awards today at a White House ceremony. National Medal of Technology laureates are: Jan D. Achenbach, Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill.; Watts S. Humphrey, Software Engineering Institute, Pittsburgh, Pa.; Robert M. Metcalfe, Polaris Venture Partners, Waltham, Mass.; team of Rodney D. Bagley and Irwin Lachman, both retired from Corning Inc., Corning, N.Y., and Ronald M. Lewis, a former Corning employee; UOP LLC, Des Plaines, Ill.; and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, Madison, Wis. National Medal of Science recipients are: behavioral/social sciences, R. Duncan Luce, professor of cognitive science, University of California, Irvine; biological sciences, J. Michael Bishop, MD, chancellor and professor, University of California, San Francisco; Solomon H. Snyder, professor of neuroscience, pharmacology and psychiatry, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; Charles Yanofsky professor of biology, Stanford University; engineering, John M. Prausnitz, professor of chemical engineering, University of California, Berkeley; mathematics, Carl R. De Boor, professor emeritus, University of Wisconsin, Madison; physical sciences, G. Brent Dalrymple, dean and professor emeritus, College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University; and Riccardo Giacconi, department of physics and astronomy, Johns Hopkins University. . . . Metrologic Instruments Inc., a Blackwood, N.J., maker of imaging and bar code scanning technology, has hired George Plesko as its principal scientist. Plesko is an executive in residence at Philadelphia's University City Science Center, associated with the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel and Temple Universities. He was previously general manager/senior vice president of the Miniature Scanner Division for PSC Scanning Systems Inc., a provider of data-capture solutions for retail supply chains, and as CEO and chairman of Gap Technologies Inc., a maker of ultraminiature laser scanners for the barcode industry. The named inventor on approximately 50 US and foreign patents, he will be involved with technical business development at Metrologic. Metrologic also announced several staffing changes in the Industrial Products Division of its subsidiary Adaptive Optics Associates Inc.: Sankar Ghosh was promoted to senior manager, Industrial Products and Systems Support, and Michael Schnee was promoted to technical manager, Industrial Products. . . . Worldwide sales of semiconductor manufacturing equipment totaled $37.08 billion in 2004, representing a year-over-year increase of 67.1 percent, according to the Worldwide Semiconductor Equipment Market Statistics (SEMS) Report, published by SEMI, an association of companies that supply manufacturing technology and materials to the world's chip makers. For more information, visit: www.semi.org