Chi-Sang Poon was elected a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in recognition of outstanding contributions to the field of medical and biological engineering. Poon is a principal research scientist in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology .
Professor David Marks of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering will receive an honorary doctorate from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden on May 17.
Marks, who is director of MIT's Laboratory for Energy and the Environment, was cited for being "actively involved in the creation of the Chalmers Environmental Initiative, which centers on systems thinking within the environmental area." Marks is coordinator for the Alliance for Global Sustainability , a partnership between MIT, Chalmers, ETH in Zurich and Tokyo University. He has been a driving force behind several large-scale initiatives that promote research and education across disciplines and cultures in the service of sustainability.
Professor Richard de Neufville of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Engineering Systems received an honorary doctorate from the Technical University of Delft on January 11. The doctorate was given in recognition of his role in founding MIT's Technology and Policy Program and disseminating its concepts to the program in Technology Management and Policy at Delft, the Technology and Policy Program at Cambridge University (starting up this fall) and the Instituto Superior Tecnico of Lisbon.
De Neufville spent February at Cambridge University as a visiting scholar and lifetime fellow at Clare Hall. While there he taught at the Judge Institute of Management in connection with the Cambridge/MIT Institute.
Alexander Rich, the William Thompson Sedgwick Professor of Biophysics, received the 2002 Passano Award for 50 years of pioneering work on nucleic acids. His contributions to biochemistry, structural biology and biological function of nucleic acids, as well as the understanding of protein biosynthesis and the role of conformational change in DNA function, have created the foundation for great strides in molecular biology, genetic engineering and the life sciences. Rich delivered the 2002 Passano Foundation Lecture at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine on April 30. The Passano Foundation of Baltimore, Md. furthers scientific research and gives its annual award to recognize oustanding American research. Other Passano Award recipients have included in 1996 Leland H. Hartwell , a genetics professor at the University of Washington who earned a Ph.D. at MIT, and in 1998, H. Robert Horvitz , professor of biology at MIT. Hartwell and 20 other Passano Award recipients have gone on to receive the Nobel Prize.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on May 1, 2002.
