Cynthia RockwellKatherine Wyman MA ’11 was one of only six graduate students nationwide to receive a Chambliss Astronomy Achievement Student Award medal for her poster at the recent 220th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The awards recognize exemplary research by undergraduate and graduate students who present at one of the poster sessions at the meetings of the AAS. Wyman’s poster was on the work she did for her master’s thesis with her advisor, Seth Redfield, assistant professor of astronomy. It involved characterizing the gas and dust that the Sun may have passed through over the last tens of millions of…
Jacob Walles ’79, the new American ambassador in Tunisia, delivered his credentials to the Tunisian presidency on July 24. A 20-year veteran of the U.S. State Department, Walles has served in a number of posts involving Middle Eastern affairs, including special assistant for the Middle East peace-process in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. He was also First Secretary at the US Embassy to Israel in Tel Aviv. Walles previously held the rank of Minister Counselor, and before that he was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs. A history major at Wesleyan, he holds a master’s degree…
Olivia DrakeFormer Wesleyan Dean of Students and Dean of the University Mark Barlow '46 died June 23 at the age of 87 in Hanover, N.H. Born in Utica, N.Y. in 1925, he graduated with a degree in mathematics from Wesleyan after serving in the Navy. He received an M.A. from Colgate University and a doctorate of education from Cornell University. He married Jane Atwood in 1954, and in 1957 he became Dean of Students at Wesleyan and later Dean of the University. Because of his age, the students dubbed him "the boy dean," but he quickly developed a reputation for handling…
David LowPolitical Animals, a six-part television mini-series created and written by Greg Berlanti with Lawrence Mark ’71 as an executive producer, premiered on USA Network on July 15. Sigourney Weaver stars as Elaine Barrish Hammond, a former first lady divorced from the ex-U.S. president who becomes secretary of state after losing the presidential nomination to a younger, less experienced male candidate. The series follows Elaine’s political success in her new job and touches upon her desire to run for the presidency again, but it also revolves around her family relations. In an article in The New York Times, Amy Chozick notes…
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Barbara Roessner ’75, P’15, was named executive editor of Hearst Connecticut Newspapers, effective Aug. 1. She will be responsible for overseeing all editorial content and initiatives in the company’s four Connecticut dailies (Connecticut Post in Bridgeport, The News-Times in Danbury, The Advocate in Stamford and Greenwich Time), as well as seven Fairfield county weeklies. Beginning at The Hartford Courant in 1978 as a beat reporter, Roessner later served as chief political writer, opinion columnist, writing coach and deputy managing editor overseeing investigative and enterprise reporting. She was part of the 1999 Courant team that received the Pulitzer…
Jean François-Poncet ’47, Hon. ’81, French diplomat, businessman, senator and Secretary General, died July 18, 2012. Wesleyan celebrated his achievements at the 1980 Wesleyan Commencement ceremonies, where François-Poncet delivered the commencement address and received an honorary degree. In 1981, he returned to campus to deliver the keynote address for Wesleyan’s 150th anniversary. An obituary in Le Monde noted that he was the son of an ambassador, André François-Poncet, who served as French ambassador to Germany from 1930–38, and observed that the younger François-Poncet had quickly made a name for himself in the 1950s as a brilliant young diplomat. In that era,…
Paul Gross '84, chair of the Hydrocephalus Association, has been nominated for the Microsoft Alumni Foundation, 2012 Integral Fellows Award, which recognizes meaningful contributions of Microsoft alumni, using time, talent, and resources to improve the daily lives of others in this country and throughout the world. Gross’s cause began with his son’s birth. Born 10 weeks prematurely, he suffered complications and developed hydrocephalus, excessive fluid in the brain, a condition that affects more than 1 million people in this country. Hydrocephalus can cause severe brain damage, and even death if not treated immediately, yet the standard of care was a…
Richard LaFond MA ’69 is the editor of Cancer: The Outlaw Cell (Oxford University Press and the American Chemical Society, Third Edition), a collection of 24 focused chapters written by leading researchers at the forefront of cancer research. Substantial developments in science and medicine, powered by developing technologies such as genetic sequencing, proteomics, and nanobiology, have driven cancer research forward, and a review of where we are now is desperately needed. Authors present the current state of knowledge in chapters on such topics as the role of heredity, cancer and telomeres, tumor resistance, cancer and aging, vaccines, the role of…
Hip-hop DJ Bobbito Garcia ’88 and photographer Kevin Couliau have co-directed Doin’ It in the Park, a new documentary about the popular culture of pick-up basketball, played in parks all over New York City’s five boroughs. Shot at 180 courts in 75 days, the film covers a cross-section of players both professional and amateur, including Julius “Dr. J” Erving, Kenny Smith, “Pee Wee” Kirkland, “Fly” Williams, God Shammgod, Tim “Headache” Gittens, Corey “Homicide” Williams, Kenny Anderson, Jack Ryan, Richard “Crazy Legs” Colon, Niki Avery, Milani Malik, and the Park Pick-Up Players of NYC. The filmmakers traveled to most of the…
Benjamin TraversIn the video below, Bruce Corwin '62 Hon '87 talks about his life, his career in the Motion Picture Exhibition Business, and his second career in philanthropy. Bruce founded the group "Alumni On Campus," to help address the social and educational issues that plague Los Angeles High School. [youtube width="640" height="420"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NUu9_Zso6g[/youtube]
Lisa Cohen, assistant professor of English, is the author of All We Know: Three Lives, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in July 2012. The book is 448 pages and includes 52 illustrations and notes. In All We Know, Cohen describes three women’s glamorous choices, complicated failures, and controversial personal lives with lyricism and empathy. Esther Murphy was a brilliant New York intellectual who dazzled friends and strangers with an unstoppable flow of conversation. But she never finished the books she was contracted to write—a painful failure and yet a kind of achievement. The quintessential fan, Mercedes de Acosta had intimate…
Lauren RubensteinHilary Barth, assistant professor of psychology, assistant professor of neuroscience and behavior, is the co-author of "Active (not passive) spatial imagery primes temporal judgements." Written along with Jessica Sullivan of the University of California-San Diego, the article was published in the June 2012 issue of The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. For this article, Barth and Sullivan looked deeper into the previously demonstrated cognitive connections between how we think about space and time. They found that only when people are asked to imagine actively moving themselves through space are their perceptions of time influenced. When participants in the experiment were primed with a similar…