Tuesday,
September 14, 1999
Volume 46
Number 3
www.upenn.edu/almanac/


UPS Educator: Dr. Engheta

This year's holder of the UPS Foundation Distinguished Educator Chair--an unusual chair that rotates among Penn's four undergraduate schools--is Dr. Nader Engheta of the School of Engineering and Applied Science.

He follows Professors William Graham, Peter K. Davies, Haim Bau and Jan Van der Spiegel as SEAS holders of the chair that recognizes "faculty who have an outstanding record of distinction in undergraduate education and have significant, broad-based impact on Penn's undergraduate programs," the School's Interim Dean Eduardo Glandt said.

Dr. Engheta is a professor of electrical engineering who is known both for his work in electromag-netics, and for his ability to combine teaching and scholarship. On taking his B.S. with high honors from the University of Teheran in 1978, he went to CalTech for his M.S. in 1979 and Ph.D. in 1982. He taught at UCLA and CalTech before joining SEAS as an assistant professor in 1987.

Two years later he was named a Presidential Young Investigator. He went on to a Fulbright Chair Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and several editorships in his field (among these, he produced the Franklin Institute's special edition on antennas and microwaves, in conjunction with the 1995 Benjamin Franklin Symposium). Meanwhile, he won three prestigious teaching awards in a row: his School's S. Reid Warren, Jr. Award in 1993; the University-wide Lindback Award in 1994; and the national W.M. Keck Foundation Teaching Excellence Award in 1995.

Cret Professor: Daniel Libeskind

Architect Daniel Libeskind, designer of the highly acclaimed new Jewish Museum in Berlin, has been named the Paul Philippe Cret Professor of Architecture in the Graduate School of Fine Arts. He will come to campus from Berlin this fall for an inaugural lecture-- The Longest Distance Between Two Points, on October 12 at 6 p.m. in B1 Meyerson Hall--and will join the faculty full time in the spring term, Dean Gary Hack said in announcing the appointment.

Originally from Poland, Mr. Libeskind, the son of two Holocaust survivors, is a world-renowned architect who has taught in the U.S. at Harvard, Yale and UCLA, as well as in Europe, Japan, Australia and South America. He is the founder and director of Architecture Intermundium, a private nonprofit institute in Milan, and he has practiced in Italy as well as in many other countries including Canada, The Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland.

A 1970 graduate of New York's Cooper Union School of Architecture, summa cum laude, Mr. Libeskind took his master's degree in history and theory of architecture at the University of Essex, where he also received an honorary doctorate in 1999. Among other honors he won Time Magazine's Best of 1998 Design Award for The Felix Nussbaum Museum in Osnabruck.

Mr. Libeskind said that Penn's Department of Architecture, and particularly the Paul Cret Chair, through the work of Louis Kahn, Aldo van Eyck and others--"represent a tradition which has always stood for the profound questioning of both the theory and practice of architecture. I intend to contribute to this living resource by engaging with the students in a search for form and its necessity in a period of global technological transformation."

 Love and 'Lost' on Locust Walk

At 36th and Locust Walk, where Tony Smith's We Lost stood for almost 25 years, the message was changed this summer to LOVE, by Robert Indiana. We Lost is out for restoration, to be reinstalled in another location not yet announced. LOVE, a polychromed aluminum sculpture that measures 72" x 72" x 36" and weighs 500 pounds, is a gift of Jeffrey and Sivia Loria. Penn's sculpture is one of many variations on the theme that Indiana created between 1966 and 1998, including a Christmas card for MOMA, a serigraph done especially for the ICA's Indiana show at Penn, and the sculpture that gives Center City's "Love Park" its name.

For more on We Lost, click here.

 Gutman Professor: John Moore

John Moore, who joined Penn in June as chair of GSFA's Fine Arts Department, has been named the first Edna and Monroe Gutman Professor in the Graduate School of Fine Arts, Dean Hack also announced.

Mr. Moore, described as one of the leading realist painters of his generation, took his B.F.A. from Washington University at St. Louis and his M.F.A. from Yale, where he was awarded the Ely Harwood Schless Memorial Prize.

He has twice won the Childe Hassam Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and he won the Academy Award in Art in 1998.

Since 1970 Mr. Moore has held more than 28 solo exhibitions. His paintings are on display in major collections and museums around the world, and he is currently in the news for his part in bringing about an exhibition called Contemporary Cityscapes, Tel Aviv-Yafo, which was mounted this past summer at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

Mr. Moore's appointment to Penn marks a return to the Philadelphia world: He taught at Temple's Tyler School of Art for 20 years before taking a position at Boston University's fine arts school, where he headed the painting department.


Almanac, Vol. 46, No. 3, September 14, 1999

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