Olivia DrakeOn the morning of June 22, Matt Donahue '14 and and Pik-Tone Fung '14 learned that a Wesleyan chemistry professor had been shot in the basement of Hall-Atwater Laboratory. Public Safety taped off the area around Room 078 and removed the body, leaving behind a blood-stained lab coat, a gun, two shell casings, a hand-written note from "Greg Mulligan," a bloody bullet and an overturned chair. Small pools of blood collected under the victim and blood droplets freckled the nearby lab cabinets and counter. The professor did owe $20,000 to Greg Mulligan. Was he murdered for not returning the money?…
David PesciIn the midst of the banking crisis affecting the euro, John Bonin found himself in June offering banking advice to two countries that are members of the European Union, but have yet to join the monetary union linked by the euro. Bonin, the Chester D. Hubbard Professor of Economics and Social Science, professor of economics, gave the keynote address during the Annual Conference of the European Association for Banking and Financial History on June 7. The event was co-sponsored by National Bank of Romania in Bucharest, Romania. The address was titled “Two Decades of Foreign Banking in Emerging Europe: the Devil is in…
Bill HolderMike Fries ’85, president and chief executive officer of Liberty Global, has made a gift of $2 million in support of the Wesleyan Cinema Archives Endowment Fund. The gift establishes the Charles W. Fries Curator of the Wesleyan Cinema Archives, which Fries named in honor of his father. Chuck Fries is considered the “godfather” of the television movie for his role in producing or supervising more than 275 hours of television movies and mini-series. His films have won Emmy, Peabody, Humanitas and Christopher awards among others from film festivals. “Wesleyan’s Cinema Archives,” says President Michael S. Roth, “is a treasure…
The Wesleyan Board of Trustees has awarded tenure to eight faculty members. Additionally, four associate professors and two adjunct faculty members also have been promoted. Wesleyan President Michael Roth and Rob Rosenthal, provost and vice president for Academic Affairs, announced the promotions, which were effective July 1. Newly tenured faculty, promoted from Assistant to Associate Professor Gloster Aaron, associate professor of biology, associate professor of neuroscience and behavior, arrived at Wesleyan in 2006, following five years as a post-doctoral researcher at Columbia University. Aaron studies the brain’s synaptic circuitry to better understand communication patterns in the neocortex. His most recent…
Lauren RubensteinJohn Kirn, professor of biology, professor and chair of the neuroscience and behavior program, in May published an article in the Journal of Neuroscience on neurogenesis in songbirds. He recently spoke about his research on WNPR public radio and in The Hartford Courant. Q: Professor Kirn, you study the neuroscience behind song learning and production in zebra finches. Please tell us about your research, and the surprising findings to come out of your most recent work. A: I’m interested in the normal functions of adult neurogenesis—the continual addition and replacement of neurons. This happens to a limited extent in humans but…
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Cynthia RockwellElizabeth “Beezer” Clarkson ’94 has joined SAP Ventures as Chief Operating Officer and Managing Director. SAP Ventures is an independent venture capital firm affiliated with SAP AG, a global enterprise software company. Clarkson will be based in the company’s Palo Alto, Calif., office and in charge of worldwide operations. She will also be managing the newly announced "SAP HANA Real-Time Fund," which is focused on early-stage venture capital funds globally, and scheduled to launch this month. Previously, Clarkson was a Director at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, a venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, Calif., where she managed the DFJ Global Network of 16 venture funds with $7 billion…
David LowLily Raff McCaulou ’02 is the author of the memoir Call of the Mild: Learning to Hunt My Own Dinner (Grand Central Publishing), which was published in June. She was raised as a gun-fearing environmentalist and an animal lover and stuck by the principle that harming animals is wrong. But her views changed when she left an indie film production career in New York to take a reporting job in central Oregon. For her articles, she began spending weekends fly-fishing and weekdays interviewing hunters and found that some of them were quite thoughtful about their relationship with animals and the…
David Nixon ’53, senior partner of the Manchester, N.H., law firm of Nixon, Vogelman, Barry, Slawsky & Simoneau, P.A., received the Chief Justice Frank Rowe Kenison Award from the New Hampshire Bar Foundation. Selected by vote of the Board of Directors of the New Hampshire Bar Foundation, Nixon was chosen for his “substantial contributions to the betterment of New Hampshire citizens through the administration of justice, the legal profession, and the advancement of legal thought.” Nixon, an economics major at Wesleyan, earned his law degree with honors from the University of Michigan Law School. He was voted one of New…