Berkeleyan
Awards
05 May 2004
AAAS 2004 fellows include seven Berkeley professors
Seven Berkeley professors are among the 178 new fellows elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in recognition of their leadership in scholarship, business, the arts, and public affairs.
The newest academy members from Berkeley include David Aldous, professor of statistics; Paul A. Alivisatos, professor of chemistry; David Collier, professor of political science; Maurice Obstfeld, Class of 1958 Professor of Economics; Christina Romer, Class of 1957 Professor of Economics; Shankar Sastry, NEC Distinguished Professor and chair of the department of electrical engineering and computer sciences; and Samuel Scheffler, professor of philosophy and law.
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) was founded in 1780. It now boasts more than 4,500 members, including more than 150 Nobel laureates and 50 Pulitzer Prize winners. Academy members conduct nonpartisan studies on various issues, ranging from international security, social policy, and education to the humanities.
The newest members will be inducted at ceremonies at academy headquarters in Cambridge, Mass., in October.
In addition to the seven Berkeley professors elected to AAAS this year, former Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Carol Christ has been named a fellow as well. Christ has been president of Smith College in Massachusetts since 2002.
Outstanding volunteers receive Chancellor’s Community Service Awards
At an awards ceremony and reception held Thursday, April 29, the campus honored students, staff, faculty, and student groups for their exceptional community- service commitments. The winners of the 2004 Chancellor’s Community Service Awards were selected from a large number of nominees. They include:
• Robert Newell, associate director of utilities engineering and operations in Physical Plant–Campus Services. Newell was honored for work on the Fiat Lux Night Safety Committee (which monitors campus outdoor lighting); the Campus Beautification Program; and off-campus volunteerism. In the community he is a long-time volunteer coach for the Albany/Berkeley Youth Soccer League; has helped for about a decade to repair local homes through Rebuilding Together (formerly known as Christmas in April); and volunteers at Whittier Elementary School.
• Peter Manoleas, field consultant and lecturer in the School of Social Welfare. Manoleas has served for 18 years in various leadership positions at La Clinica de la Raza, a nonprofit that provides health services for low-income Bay Area residents. In June 2002 he was appointed by Gov. Gray Davis to the Board of Behavioral Sciences, a consumer-protection body that oversees mental-health professionals for the state of California.
• Seven campus students and six student organizations.
Lowell Bergman
The New York Times won a 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for an investigative series by reporters Lowell Bergman, adjunct professor at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, and David Barstow. The prize-winning series by the two Times reporters, who worked in collaboration with the PBS series “Frontline” and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, followed workplace-safety practices of McWayne, Inc., one of the world’s largest makers of water and sewer pipes. The company, based in Birmingham, Ala., has since become the subject of a major criminal inquiry by the Department of Justice.
Bergman is the former producer of CBS’s “60 Minutes” whose role in investigating the tobacco industry was portrayed by actor Al Pacino in the film The Insider. The Times series on workplace death and injury also won the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, a duPont-Columbia University Award for broadcast journalism, and an Investigative Reporters and Editors award.
Gordon Rausser
Faculty member Gordon Rausser, the Robert Gordon Sproul Distinguished Professor of Agriculture and Resource Economics, has been named as winner of the 2004 College of Natural Resources Citation
Rausser served as the dean of the College of Natural Resources (CNR) from 1994 to 2000 and chaired its agricultural and resource economics department on two separate occasions (1979-85 and 1993-94). His service to CNR, says current dean Paul Ludden, “has been demonstrated in all areas: teaching, research, outreach, administration, and fundraising. For his vision and dedication to the college, he clearly deserves our highest recognition.”
The CNR Citation, now in its third year, honors an individual, couple, or group that has made important contributions to the College of Natural Resources and its programs. Rausser accepted the award at a May 6 ceremony outside Giannini Hall.
Dorothy Robinson
Senior Artist Dorothy Robinson, a Public Affairs staffer and long-time designer of the Berkeleyan, has won a one-year residency in Manhattan from the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation. A painter whose work strikes a balance between representation and abstraction, she earned both her bachelor’s degree and MFA at Berkeley, in geography and art practice respectively. The former informs the latter, in that her paintings often begin with aspects of the natural world — landforms, water, plant life, and weather — and “gracefully veer off into personal and interior vistas and memory,” as Professor Katherine Sherwood, with whom Robinson studied, has put it.
Robinson is one of 14 artists, selected from among 1,100 applicants, to win a 2004-05 residency through the foundation’s prestigious Space Program. Designed by artists Chuck Close and Phillip Pearlstein, the program provides promising artists with free studio space in lower Manhattan’s TriBeCa district, as well as with opportunities to intersect with the New York art world.
A practicing artist since 1983 while holding down “day jobs” (at the Berkeleyan since 1997, and before that as an administrative assistant and a photographic technician), Robinson plans to retire from UC on Aug. 1 and move to New York City shortly thereafter; her residency begins Sept. 1. On the West Coast, and especially at the Berkeleyan, she will be missed.