UA professor emeritus and Nobel Prize winner Willis E. Lamb, Jr. will receive a lifetime dedication award from the Nobel Foundation's meetings of Nobel Prize winners Friday, making Lamb the first American and third person overall to win the prestigious honor.

Lamb, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1955, will receive the Lennart Bernadotte Award, named after the family that has hosted the meeting of Nobel laureates and protégés - graduate students - since 1951.

"He has inspired thousands of students and young post- doctoral researchers, and for this reason we have decided to award him with the Lennart Bernadotte Medal," said Ludwig Feinendegen, vice president of the Committee for the Meetings of Nobel Laureates in Lindau, Germany.

Nicolaas Bloembergen, an optical sciences professor at the UA and Nobel Prize winner in 1981, said Lamb is getting the award for his interaction with the graduate students he has inspired over the years.

"Lamb is a very energetic and intellectual person and has done some really outstanding work while here at the university," Bloembergen said.

Roland Hirsch, program manager in the Office of Biological and Environmental Research for the U.S. Department of Energy, said he holds Lamb in high regard.

"Dr. Lamb's simple, humble, brilliant and utterly charming personality is something people take great pleasure in knowing," Hirsch said. "To say that it was a treat for students to meet with him is at best, an understatement."

Feinendegen said Lamb and other laureates come to annual meetings held each June to interact with college and university students from around the world by seeing the studies and projects in which students are engaged in the fields of biology, chemistry and physiology or medicine.

Feinendegen said the annual meeting brings Nobel laureates and promising young student researchers together for a week in Lindau where "the young scientists learn from and get inspired by the masters."

Hirsch said these students are usually in their second or third year of graduate school and are selected from various universities around the world. From there, they go through a difficult nomination process through the Department of Energy or the National Science Foundation and finally to the Nobel Prize committee to be considered for the opportunity.

American universities usually select one or two students to represent their institutions at the meeting, with more than 500 other students from all over the world accompanying them, Hirsch said.

"The meeting helps bring about an amazing exchange of ideas among different disciplines and countries," he said.

Feinendegen said the interaction of the student "science giants" with the laureate "science elites" has become an intercultural exchange of ideas.

He said graduate students Lamb interacts with at the meetings always praise his work.

"It's amazing to see how the students react and hold onto every word he says," Bloembergen said. "They held their breaths just to absorb as much of him as possible. They were truly listening to a legend."

Bloembergen said he has attended all the meetings in Lindau since winning the Nobel Prize and said the relationship between the laureates and the students is unique.

"The interaction with younger generation is incredible," he said. "Both the student and the laureate learn a great deal about one another and the field of study they've been researching."