Bennett Awards Creates New Custom Award Design for Bell Labs

Bennett Awards worked closely with Nokia Bell Labs to create a custom award design for one of the recognition awards they present each year. This award is called the Shannon Luminary Award. It is presented as part of the Shannon Luminary Lecture Series and Award, which explores and recognizes all topics of high impact and relevance to the future of human existence. The series consists of ten talks by the leading visionary researchers, developers, thinkers, and entrepreneurs from all fields of scientific, technological, engineering, mathematical, or related artistic endeavor.

The Shannon Luminary Award is named after Claude Shannon, the father of information theory and arguably of all communications and networked systems.

The custom award Bennett Awards created for this new recognition award was designed in the form of an impressionistic sculpture figure representing Claude Shannon. The hand-sculpted figure was surrounded by a variety of sculpted objects that paid homage to Shannon’s interests and passions, including an electronic mouse, a clarinet, and a unicycle. The figure was also juggling, and the balls were supported by a flowing banner that contained some of the mathematical theorems developed by Shannon.

The sculpture award was mounted on a marble base with the Nokia Bell Labs logotype, award name, recipient name, and date of presentation.

The 2016 recipient of the Shannon Luminary Award as Zhenan Bao, professor of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University. Bao is a leading visionary and innovator in nanoscience, chemical engineering, and materials science. Her recent work promises to fundamentally change prosthetics and other areas of medicine and engineering.

Bao received here award at her presentation held December 1, 2016, at the Hamming Innovation Hall on the Murray Hill Bell Labs Campus.