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Researchers Honored

President Obama announced the winners of this year's National Medal of Science and National Medal of Technology and Innovation, reports The Chronicle of Higher Education's Paige Chapman. Two of this year's science medal winners were honored for their work on prions — Stanley Prusiner, director of the Institute for Neurogenerative Diseases at UCSF, who coined the term "prion", and Susan Lindquist, an MIT biology professor and Whitehead Institute member, who discovered how protein folding leads to neurological disorders. The other winners of the science medal include various researchers in the fields of chemistry, physics, neuroscience, mathematics, and atmospheric research, Chapman adds. The three researchers who won the technology medal were honored for their contributions "that improve either the nation's work force or its environmental or social well-being," Chapman says.