President Clinton has announced his intention to nominate Cornell University Nobel laureate Robert C. Richardson to the National Science Board. Richardson is Cornell's vice provost for research and the Floyd R. Newman Professor of Physics.

Also to be nominated to the science board are Anita K. Jones, university professor at the University of Virginia and professor of computer science in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and Pamela A. Ferguson, professor of mathematics at Grinnell College, Iowa, and the college's former president.

Richardson shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1996 for the 1971 discovery that the helium isotope helium-3 can be made to flow without resistance -- a state called a superfluidity -- at about two-thousandths of a degree above absolute zero, or minus-273.15 degrees Centigrade. Richardson became a research associate at Cornell in 1966 after receiving his Ph.D. in physics from Duke University. He was named a full professor in 1975. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1986 and served as chair of the academy's physics section. He also served as co-chair of the materials division of the panel on large magnetic fields for the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The National Science Board was organized in 1950 to establish the policies of the NSF. Nominees to the board are eminent in the fields of medicine, social sciences, engineering, agriculture, education, research management or public affairs and are selected on the basis of their established record of distinguished service.