2000-10-01
- The 40-year career at Merck Research Laboratories of chemist Seemon H. Pines (MS, '49; PhD, '51, chemistry) has been in pursuit of therapeutic agents that fight infection, reduce inflammation, and make us healthier. This College of LAS Achievement Award winner has accomplished the seemingly impossible by developing the means for economically synthesizing a staggering number of life-enhancing...
2000-10-01 - Juvenile delinquency, crime, and violence are the steady diet of the urban magistrate. As chief judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, Eugene N. Hamilton (AB, '55, general curriculum) has seen his share. But witnessing the outcome of poverty and despair has not jaded him. Quite the opposite. It has fortified his determination to improve the social conditions of those who daily...
2000-10-01 - The career of Susan Nagele (BS, '78, biology) is decidedly uncharacteristic of our times. In an age when many pursue instant wealth and leisure, this year's College of LAS Humanitarian Award winner, who is a Maryknoll Catholic missionary, aspires to serve humanity and forsake worldly amenities. It's been her dream for 16 years, and she wouldn't trade it for a dot.com fortune. After...
2000-10-01 - Everything is made of chemicals, but sometimes, it is necessary to separate one chemical from another—for instance, to purify metal ores, to clean up contaminated wastes, even to combat disease. One of this year's College of LAS Achievement Award winners, E. Philip Horwitz (MS, '55; PhD, '57, chemistry), is a master of such "chemical separations" technology: he has developed a number of...- 1999-10-01 - Carol Stack (AM, '68; PhD, '72, anthropology) has been a force in cultural anthropology almost since the day she turned in her dissertation. All Our Kin, the book that sprang from her research, became an instant classic in ethnography and is still one of the most widely read examinations of African-American urban culture. Published in 1974, it tore down stereotypes and opened the way...
1999-10-01 - The life work of Jim Davis (BS, '54, psychology) has revolved around answering a single, deceptively simple question: How do small groups of people reach decisions? In the process of doing so, he has influenced business practices and Supreme Court decisions, reinvented the field of group decision making, and earned the honor of being considered the greatest social psychologist of his generation....
1999-10-01 - Molly Melching (AB, '71; AM, '79, French) arrived in Senegal in 1974 as a graduate exchange student on a six-month visa. Twenty-five years later she is still there. She has found a home among its people and her destiny in promoting literacy and self-help among its rural poor. Upon her arrival in this former French colony, Melching immersed herself in the Senegalese culture and mastered Wolof,...- 1999-10-01 - Ed Cupp (PhD, '69, entomology) saw his first victims of river blindness during a field trip to Guatemala in 1969. He was a graduate student at Illinois at the time, but he never forgot the sight. Lesions and nodules covered the bodies of children and had spread to the eyes of many adults. Today, Cupp is an internationally recognized medical entomologist whose exhaustive studies of the insect...