This column offers a sampling of honors recently awarded to UC Davis faculty, staff and units:

Law Professor Keith Aoki has been elected to the American Law Institute, widely considered the nation’s most important organization of legal scholars. ALI oversees law reform projects that often form the basis of laws enacted across the country and become standards cited in judges’ legal opinions, lawyers’ briefs, and scholarly articles. ALI membership is a distinct professional honor, and the number that can be admitted is limited to 3,000. Aoki joins 13 other UC Davis School of Law faculty who are members of this prestigious institution.

David Pines, distinguished professor of physics at UC Davis and co-director of the Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter, has been awarded the 2009 John Bardeen Prize for Superconductivity Theory. The award was presented Sept. 9 at the 9th International Conference on Materials and Mechanisms in Superconductivity in Tokyo, Japan.

Alessandro Pizzo, an assistant professor of mathematics, was invited to give a plenary talk at the XVI International Congress on Mathematical Physics in Prague, in August. Pizzo spoke on “The Infrared Problem in Nonrelativistic QED” and was one of 16 plenary speakers at the largest mathematical-physics conventions.

—Dateline staff