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. |