Three MIT faculty members-Professors Ella L. Bell, Robin W. Kilson and Ritsuko Taho-are among 42 women from the United States and abroad who have been appointed 1993-94 fellows at Radcliffe College's Bunting Institute.
Dr. Bell, visiting associate professor at the Sloan School of Management, has recently completed, with Professor Stella M. Nkomo, of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, a groundbreaking study of the effects of race and gender on the experiences of women managers in private corporations. They will continue their work at the Bunting Institute and report their findings in a book to be published in 1994.
Dr. Kilson, assistant professor of history, will research and write about the historical experience of African-American women who obtained doctoral degrees before the 1960s; the careers of the present generation of black women scholars; and the effect of affirmative action policies on black women at college campuses.
Professor Kilson also has been awarded a National Academy of Education Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship of $35,000 to assist in the completion of her book project.
Professor Taho, assistant professor of visual arts in the Department of Architecture and Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Professor, will work on the "Nasu Project," a sculpture and landscape design project commissioned in Japan. Through interior and exterior environmental installations, she explores the relationship between private self and the public world nature and culture, and art and audience.
Two doctoral candidates-Lisa R. Moore in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Inger H. Weibust in the Department of Political Science-are the recipients of the second annual Volvo/MIT Award for Environmental Research.
Ms. Moore, a student of Professor Sallie W. Chisholm in the Ralph M. Parsons Laboratory, has done outstanding work comparing physiological responses of two Prochlorococcus strains isolated from different oceans.
Ms. Weibust is doing research on international environmental policy problems. According to her advisor, Professor Kenneth A. Oye, director of the Center for International Studies, she has demonstrated competence as a first-rate policy analyst.
The awards were established by Volvo North America Corporation in recognition of MIT's broad range of activities associated with understanding and solving problems of the earth's environment, and also Volvo's commitment to environmental stewardship.
The purpose of the awards, worth approximately $15,000 each, is to stimulate and recognize promising research by nontenured faculty members or graduate students. Nominations are made by department, laboratory or section heads; a subcommittee of the MIT Council on Global Environment, appointed by the provost, reviews the nominations and recommends the award recipients.
The first two awardees were Dr. Dana E. Hartley in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, and Joanne M. Kauffman of the Department of Political Science.
Two members of the Music and Theater Arts Faculty-Dr. David M. Epstein, professor of music and conductor of the MIT Symphony Orchestra, and Dr. Evan Ziporyn, assistant professor of music-have been chosen as 1993-94 ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) Award recipients.
The cash awards are made to assist and encourage writers of serious music. They are granted by an independent panel on the basis of the unique prestige value of each writer's catalog of original compositions, as well as the recent performance activities of those works in areas no surveyes by ASCAP.
Nancy-Lorena Torres, a junior majoring in biology, is one of 125 college undergraduates from throughout the US chosen for the 1993 Honors Premedical Academy at Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University, both in Houston.
The goal of the six-week summer program is to increase minority representation in medicine.
Ms. Torres came to MIT from the J. M. Hanks High School in El Paso, TX.
Dr. Suzanne Berger, Ford International Professor of Political Science, has been appointed to the German-American Academic Council. The announcement was made by President Bill Clinton and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
Professor Berger attended the first Council meeting in Bonn, Germany, in June, where she met with Chancellor Kohl. The Council, which consists of 30 persons-half from the US and half from Germany-supports joint studies and other activities among German and American scholars in the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities.
The Council, with funding of about $11.5 million over four years, is sponsored by several non-governmental organizations. From the American side, they include the National Academy of Sciences, American Council of Learned Societies, American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Social Science Research Council.
A version of this article appeared in the August 25, 1993 issue of MIT Tech Talk (Volume 38, Number 3).
