The first Hannes Alfvén Prize of the Plasma Physics Division of theEuropean Physical Society has been awarded to Professor Emeritus Radu Balescu(Université Libre de Bruxelles) for his outstanding scientific work inthe field of statistical physics of charged particles and of controlledfusion. The Prize was handed out to the recipient by Sir A WWolfendale, President of the European Physical Society, during theopening session of the 27th Conference on Controlled Fusion and PlasmaPhysics in Budapest (12--16 June 2000). This important Prize bears thename of the second Nobel laureate (after I Langmuir) for work in thedomain of the fourth state of matter.Professor Radu Balescu was born in 1932 in Bucharest, Romania, of aBelgian mother, and acquired Belgian nationality in 1959. He studied at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and was the assistant ofProfessor I Prigogine (Nobel laureate in 1977) from 1957 until 1961.Until becoming Emeritus in 1997, he had been Ordinary Professor at theUniversity of Brussels. He has lectured or has been visiting Professor allover Europe, in Kyoto, Austin and Mexico. Balescu made originalcontributions to plasma physics which led in 1963 to the publication ofStatistical Mechanics of Charged Particles (Interscience, 465 pp).This book contains a fairly complete statistical description of systemsof charged particles. It is well known that the latter have a verypeculiar behaviour as compared to neutral fluids. The reason is the longrange of the Coulomb interactions, which introduces a stronglycollective character. The usual methods of statistical mechanics, inparticular of non-equilibrium states, lead to mathematical divergencesin all expressions of the physical quantities. In 1960, Balescu deriveda new kinetic equation by identifying an approximation scheme differentfrom the usual Boltzmann or Landau schemes. The collective, many-bodycharacter of the collision processes in a plasma is thus explicitlyaccounted for, and the divergences disappear. It thus becomes possibleto construct a consistent theory of transport processes in a fullyionized high-temperature plasma (unfortunately this necessarily highlynon-linear kinetic equation is very difficult to solve). Theconsequences of this new kinetic equation, now called the Balescu--Lenardequation, are developed in this book, both for classical and quantummechanical plasmas.But Balescu remained very active in general statistical mechanics andpublished in 1975 Equilibrium and Nonequilibrium Statistical Mechanics(Wiley, 742 pp). This book is a comprehensive treatise ofstatistical mechanics. The main purpose was to achieve a presentationthat would be as unified as possible. The new feature was a very widecoverage of non-equilibrium theory, which was not treated in standardtextbooks of that time. It also introduced for the first time in atextbook some new concepts, such as the renormalization group theory ofcritical phenomena, which turned out to be very successful inforthcoming years. This book is still very widely cited in theliterature. Both this book and the previous one have been translatedinto Russian by leading Russian theorists.The formulation of many-body dynamics in the framework of specialrelativity has been for a long time a difficult problem, and theprevious answers were ambiguous. In a Physica paper of 1967, R Balescuand T Kotera, inspired by a very elegant work of Dirac, achieved aunification of classical (and later, quantum) Hamiltonian dynamics andspecial relativity. The key is the construction of a realization of thegenerators of the Poincaré group in terms of canonical transformations.The result is a set of ten generalized Liouville equations acting on thephase space distribution function for a plasma and the electromagneticfield. These equations tell us how to describe time translation, spatialtranslation, rotation and Lorentz transformation in terms of canonicaltransformations which automatically ensure the relativistic covarianceof the theory.As a natural extension and application of the work on relativisticstatistical mechanics of plasma--radiation interaction, he becameinterested in the programme of laser fusion and inertial confinement. Hepublished several papers on anomalous transport in laser-createdturbulent plasmas and on parametric instabilities. He served as aEuratom expert in this field and conducted several missions tolaboratories devoted to laser fusion in Livermore, Los Alamos,Palaiseau, Limeil and Garching.In 1988, Professor Balescu published a magnum opus Transport Processesin Plasmas (North-Holland, 803 pp) Volume 1: Classical transport; Volume2: Neoclassical transport. This set of two volumes presents acomprehensive review of the classical and the neoclassical theories oftransport in plasmas, especially in the regime relevant to thermonuclearfusion. After Hinton and Hazeltine's (Review of Modern Physics) andHirschmann and Sigmar's (Nuclear Fusion) partial attempts at a moreconsistent formulation of neo-classical theory, this is the first fullyconsistent presentation of the theory. It starts from firstprinciples (Hamiltonian mechanics), going through kinetic theory, andending in the explicit calculation of the transport coefficients and thediscussion of the thermodynamic aspects of the transport. The secondvolume describes the non-trivial influence of the toroidal geometry(existing in magnetically confined plasmas) on the transport. The mainaim here again was a unified presentation of the theory. It should beemphasized that these volumes encompass not only the work of manyauthors but that it is original in its conception and it includes manyhundreds of pages of new consistent calculations and results. It isconsidered by many theorists as the current bible for plasma transportprocesses and has already been translated into Chinese.These volumes do not include the so-called `anomalous transport', aparticularly important, very difficult, and still open problem (it maypossibly become the subject of a forthcoming third volume!). Thisproblem is strongly connected to the study of turbulent phenomena inplasmas and Balescu and his co-authors have treated plasma turbulenceby different methods. A Physical Review paper of 1995 is a typical example ofsuch a study. It is shown there, on the basis of a simple, analyticallysolvable model of the motion of charged particles in a stochasticmagnetic field, how dynamical and probabilistic concepts can be combinedto form a theory of anomalous (or `strange') transport. In particular, itis shown that the process can be described by a `continuous-time randomwalk' (CTRW). It is then possible to use the well-developed methods ofstochastic processes to study this type of turbulent plasma.This survey of Professor Balescu's work amply demonstrates the breadth and the depth ofhis contribution, not only to theoretical basic plasmaand fusion physics, but also to statistical physics in general. Itencompasses the conceptual roots of the disciplines and addresses themost challenging present-day problems. The excellence of hiscontributions have already been recognized at a young age by the awardof the De Donder Prize of the Académie Royale de Belgique in 1961and by the very prestigious Prix Francqui in 1970. He is a member orforeign member of several academies and recently received the vonEngel Prize of the International Conference on Phenomena in IonisedGases. His academic position and his (partly) fusion-oriented researchfield made Professor Balescu a valuable and esteemed counsellor and judge inall matters of sciences and of fusion science development in Belgium andan advisor in the development of European fusion research.Professor Emeritus Paul VandenplasDirector of the Association Euratom-Belgian State for Controlled Fusion