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Awards

08 May 2002 |

Staff and faculty receive community service awards
Staff, faculty, and students were honored April 24 with the Chancellor’s Community Service Awards, granted each year for exceptional public service.

Devin Kinyon, community projects coordinator in the Office of Student Life, said that nominations originate from many sources, including colleagues, community agencies and supervisors.

Chuck Hammond won his award for donating 10 years of Saturdays to the San Quentin Utilization of Inmate Resources, Experiences and Studies program. Hammond is a computer resource manager with Information Systems and Technology.

“The program brings boys between 12 and 18 into San Quentin to show them where their behavior is taking them,” he said. “They sit in a circle with inmates who ask the boys what’s going on in their lives. The boys don’t want to be there; some are there by court order, some are brought by their probation officers or parents, some by school administrators.

“I’ve seen a lot of lives being changed,” he added. “I’ve seen lifers in for murder doing something constructive.” Hammond hopes the program will help the kids turn away from gangs and guns and back to their parents and education.

Another staff winner is David Hernes, who works with St. Joseph Catholic Church in Pinole and organizes the Berkeley Staff Assembly’s annual food and toy drive. On campus, Hernes is a purchasing and administrative specialist for the math department. At church, Hernes is involved with after school religious education classes that prepare young children for their first communions and older children for confirmation.

“These classes teach values,” said Hernes. “I’m the emergency person, the first aid person, the traffic control person, the bouncer. They need someone with a big voice. I was a sergeant in Vietnam, and when I holler you can hear me for half a mile. I had to holler once, when a little kid was running in front of a car. They heard me.”

Other 2002 staff winners are Keleigh Ento for her commitment to the Junior Southern Heirs Club; Lou Milani for his work with the Police Athletic League; and Maria Lucero Padilla for her efforts for the Berkeley Public Library Foundation.

The faculty winner for 2002 is Professor Alan Steinbach, for creating and developing the Suitcase Clinic, a full-service medical clinic for the homeless.

Three campus scientists elected to National Academy of Sciences
Three Berkeley scientists — Carlos Bustamante, Charles Harris and Geoffrey Marcy — have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors a U.S. scientist or engineer can receive.

The three are among 72 new members and 15 foreign associates announced April 30. Their election brings the total number of Berkeley faculty holding membership in the academy to 122.

Bustamante, a professor of molecular and cell biology and of physics, and an investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Berkeley, applies cutting-edge technologies to understand the folding of biological molecules. Among his many interests are tiny biological machines inside the cell that copy DNA and read the genetic code to construct proteins. Busta-mante also works in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s physical biosciences division.

Harris, a professor of chemistry, uses extremely fast, pulsed visible and infrared lasers to study chemical reactions on a time scale of femtoseconds (1 quadrillionth of a second). His interests lie in how electrons move about on a surface or interface between two materials, and in understanding the reactions that occur when a chemical is dissolved in a liquid.

Marcy, a professor of astronomy and director of Berkeley’s Center for Integrative Planetary Science, pioneered the search for planets beyond our solar system, along with colleague Paul Butler, now at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Since its first discovery of an extrasolar planet in 1995, the team has discovered the majority of all known extrasolar planets.

Another newly elected academy member, Jennifer Doudna, will join the campus’s molecular and cell biology department in January 2003. Currently, she is a professor in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University and an associate investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute there. She uses techniques such as cryoelectron microscopy and X-ray crystallography to understand the biological machine that translates RNA, and is studying how the hepatitis C virus hijacks this cellular machine.

 


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