Retired Prof. John Prescott was presented with an AIP ‘Outstanding Service to Physics Award’ at the 13th AINSE Nuclear Techniques of Analysis Conference held in Sydney during 26-28 November 2003.

In addition to his impressive teaching and research career, John has served the Physics community in Australia by producing his invaluable annual report on Physics employment statistics and job advertisements. This data has provided important insight into Physics careers in Australia and has helped the AIP understand the needs of its constituency as well as providing an indicator for the state of Physics as a discipline. He has provided this service, with regular reports published in the Physicist, for over 25 years, despite retiring from the University of Adelaide in 1989.

John’s thermoluminescence laboratory at the University of Adelaide has made a major contribution to our understanding of the geology, climate and human colonisation of the Australian continent, including a recently published paper in Nature that provides a definitive date for the Lake Mungo burials. This date (40 kyr) is consistent with the Out-of-Africa model for human colonisation of the Australian continent and is an important contribution to this controversial debate.

John was presented with the Outstanding Service to Physics Award in acknowledgement of his outstanding contributions to the Australian Physics community. (Despite his apparent youth, John turns 80 y.o. in May 2004.)

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