HONORS & Other Things


Humboldt Award: Dr. Lahiri

Dr. Sukhamay Lahiri, professor of physiology in the School of Medicine, is the recipient of Germany's Humboldt Research Award for Senior U.S. Scientists in recognition of his past achievements in research, where he is noted for his work in the cellular mechanisms of oxygen-sensing organs and the biology of chronic hypoxia. The award includes an opportunity for an extended research stay in Germany, to promote scientific cooperation between the two countries.


Arts & Sciences Academy: Dr. Bailey

Dr. Elizabeth E. Bailey, the John C. Hower Professor of Public Policy and Management at the Wharton School, was inducted last month as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.


Taking Office

Dr. Amos B. Smith, III, the Rhodes-Thompson Professor of Chemistry, has been named chair of the Medicinal Chemistry Study Section for NIH's Division of Research Grants. He will serve from July 1 until June 30, 1999.

Dr. Virginia A. LiVolsi, professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at PennMed and vice chair of the Division of Anatomic Pathology, has been elected president of the Association of Directors of Anatomic and Surgical Pathology. She will serve a two-year term as head of the organization, created in 1989 to speak to the needs of the subspecialty within an academic setting. Dr. LiVolsi's work is in cancer of the thyroid, breast and cervix, and she is a the principal investigator for the Cooperative Human Tissue Network, Eastern Division.

Dr. John Q. Trojanowski, professor of pathology and laboratory medicine and director of Penn's Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases, will begin next month his one-year term as president of the American Association of Neuropathologists. Dr. Trojanowski, who also directs the National Institute of Aging's Alzheimer's Disease Center here, is the fourth Penn scientist to head the organization; his three predecessors are Dr. Nicholas Gonatas, Dr. Lucy Rorke and Dr. William Schlaepfer.


Team Ophthalmologist: Dr. Brucker

The Philadelphia KIXX soccer team, the city's newest franchised professional sports team, has named Dr. Alexander J. Brucker of PennMed as team ophthalmologist. Dr. Brucker, an internationally known professor of ophthalmology who is based at the Scheie Eye Institute, is a two-time recipient of PennMed's Golden Apple Award for Outstanding Teaching, and of the Albrecht von Graefe Award for distinguished contributions in ophthalmology.


Penn Relays Wall of Fame

Four athletes and four relay teams have been selected for induction onto the Penn Relay Carnival Wall of Fame which was started in 1994 at the 100th running of the Relays. This year's individual inductees competed at the Relays over a span of nearly 50 years, from 1937 to 1984. The relay teams inducted this year are the 1916 Cornell Four-Mile Relay, the 1939 Mercersburgh Academy 440-Yard Relay, the 1967 Tennessee Shuttle Hurdle Relay and the 1989 Camperdown High School girls' 4 x 100 Meter Relay.

The individuals selected are: Don Lash (Indiana '37, unattached '38) who set a four-mile Carnival Record that lasted 21 years; Lennox Miller (Kingston College Jamaica High '65) the star of the first Jamaican team to compete at Penn; Bruce Collins (Chester PA High '69; Penn '74, Philadelphia Pioneer Club '76) a hurdler and sprinter who anchored winning shuttle hurdle teams in his three varsity years at Penn; and Randy Givens (Florida State '84) who set a pair of Carnival Records, earned seven watches in her career and was the women's star of the 1983 Carnival.


Three for HERS

This year Penn will send to the Summer Institute for Women in Higher Education Anita Gelburd, director of faculty administration at the Wharton School; Donna Milici, director of academic computing services, ISC; and Isabel Sampson-Mapp, assistant director of the African American Resource Center. The national institute, co-founded at Penn and held at Bryn Mawr College, is in its 22nd year as a national training ground for women faculty and staff to prepare for advancement in higher education administration.



The 1997 Ivy Stone (detail at right) will be dedicated on Saturday, May 17, in front of College Hall at approximately 5:30 p.m., after the 4:30 p.m. Ivy Day ceremony in Irvine Auditorium.

This year's Ivy Stone is by Rebecca Waranch, C'97, a Design of the Environment major who is treasurer of the Senior Class Board.



Writers House: Resident Coordinator Kerry Sherin

Kerry E. Sherin, a Penn alumna now a doctoral candidate and teaching assistant at Temple, will become Resident Coordinator of the Kelly Writers House on July 1, the House's director, Dr. Alan Filreis, has announced. She will succeed Shawn Walker, C'96, who received the Thouron Award in 1996 which she deferred for a year in order to help establish Writers House.

Ms. Sherin was a religious studies major, C '87, active in the poetry scene, who with a few friends ran a funded weekly reading series called Fresh Fish (bringing to campus Margaret Atwood, Amiri Baraka and Olga Broumas, among others). She also edited 34th Street's book review section and produced a national newsletter on computers in the arts. After graduating, she took an M.A. at the special writing program at Hollins College, and then a second M.A. when she joined the graduate program at Temple. As a graduate student she has taught a number of writing seminars, winning a Temple Distinguished Teaching Award in 1992. She also won the Associated Writing Programs (AWP) Award for Poetry in 1990.

Her publications include reviews in the Philadelphia Inquirer; poems such as the four published recently in Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas; and fiction including "A True Story" published in the book From Elvis to Oz. In addition to teaching a poetry writing workshop at Temple she has for several years taught a special evening course there called "Calling All Fiction Lovers," in which students discuss novels by writers appearing in Philadelphia. Before joining Temple's program she worked as an assistant to the film director Jim Jarmusch in New York City, helping particularly with the film Mystery Train and arranging for Jarmusch's showing at the Cannes Film Festival. Faculty advisor to Temple's student literary journal, Parable, she has served as judge in best screenplay contests, at student film festivals, and this term in the undergraduate essay contest at Penn.


On the Cover: Dance Nearing a Sell-Out

For Philadanco's 28th Annual Spring Concert Thursday through Saturday, two of the matinees are sold out (Thursday and Friday) but tickets are available for the 8 p.m. shows each evening and for Saturday's 2:15 matinee at the Annenberg Center's Zellerbach Theatre.Tickets are $25 for the evening performances on May 15-17; $20 with PENNcard. Tickets for this Saturday's "Family Matinee" are $15 for an adult and child combo; each additional adult or child is $8. Call the box office at 898-6791 for tickets.


Collaborative Teaching/Learning about Africa

The University's African Studies Center, in collaboration with the School District of Philadelphia, has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for enhancing teaching and learning about Africa through the use of Modeling, the Internet and Interactive Distance-Learning.

The $185,000 grant, which will support the use of interactive television and the World Wide Web to introduce Philadelphia-area teachers to East African history, languages and culture, is one of the first to be funded under NEH's three-year Teaching with Technology Initiative. Dr. Sandra Barnes, professor of anthropology and director of the African Studies Center, will administer the grant, one of only twelve such projects the NEH funded out of a total of 310 applications.


ICA: Top Ten of NEA Matching Grants

The Institute for Contemporary Art also scored high in the national competition for support, with a $250,000 Planning and Stabilization grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Only ten of the 125 such grants in the nation came to as much as $250,000 (others in the top ten included Harvard's Fogg Art Museum, the Whitney, and the fine arts museums of Boston and Houston). ICA must raise $750,000 under the NEA's 3:1 rule. Coming in a year when NEA awards themselves were significantly fewer (down from 3,656 in 1995 to around 1000 in 1996), the award "signifies the NEA's confidence in the mission and methodology of the ICA," said Director Patrick T. Murphy. "This award forms the foundation for an endowment that will ensure our continued dedication to presenting the art of our time."


Teens Funding Research at PennMed

For the first time in medical history, according to PennMed's public affairs offic, a group of teenage students will provide the major funding for medical research of a genetic disease in children: the New Jersey Association of Student Councils raised $120,000 for the Ian Foundation, which will single-handedly fund a two-year postdoctoral research fellowship at PennMed. Over 5000 high school students attended the conference at Six Flags Great Adventure last week where the NJASC--representing some 300 middle and high-school student councils in the state--presented the award.

The research is to investigate the causes and treatment of Progressive Osseous Heteroplasia (POH), a genetic disorder that strangles normal tissue and turns it to bone, leading to the permanent immobilization of muscles and joints. The Ian Foundation is named for Ian Wheeler, the six-year-old son of Sandra and Richard Wheeler, who set up the foundation in 1995 after their son was diagnosed with POH. Dr. Frederick S. Kaplan, chief of metabolic bone diseases and molecular orthopedics here--and the first to identify POH--called the students fund-raising "testimony not only to the commitment of these young men and women, but also to their foresight and vision."


Almanac

Volume 43 Number 34
May 13, 1997


Return to Almanac's homepage.

Return to index for this issue.