Frederick Crowley, assistant comptroller in the Comptroller's Accounting Office, was awarded the American Payroll Association's Meritorious Service Award. He was recognized for his service on the APA's Government Affairs Task Force. "As a member of the Employment Tax Forms Subcommittee, Fred has represented the university community in helping to clarify issues surrounding payroll withholding, information reporting on scholarship and fellowship monies, resident and non-resident aliens, students and other situations unique to universities," his citation read.
The American Nuclear Society has honors for two faculty members this year. Dr. Mujid S. Kazimi, professor and head of the Department of Nuclear Engineering, has been elected to Fellowship in the group. Dr. Neil E. Todreas, KEPCO Professor of Nuclear Engineering and professor of mechanical engineering, will receive the1995 Arthur Holly Compton Award as an outstanding educator in nuclear engineering. Both will be conferred at the ANS annual meeting in Philadelphia.
The Society of Plastics Engineers has presented its John W. Hyatt Award to Professor Robert S. Langer, Germeshausen Professor of Chemistry and Biomedical Engineering in the Department of Chemical Engineering. According to the SPE, "Dr. Langer has been and continues to be instrumental in revolutionizing the ways that polymer science contributes to medicine by developing polymeric delivery systems for drugs that have saved the lives of many people." The Hyatt award is made in memory of the inventor of celluloid who is considered to be the father of the US plastics industry.
Professor Julian Szekely of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering was elected to honorary membership of the Iron and Steel Institute of Japan at the group's 80th annual meeting, at which he also delivered the Yukawa Memorial Lecture. His title: "Industrial Ecology and Steel Technology-A Challenge for the 21st Century."Other department faculty who have received honorary membership are Morris Cohen, Merton Flemings and the late John Elliot.
Dr. Seymour A. Papert, professor of education and media technology and LEGO Professor of Learning Research, was keynote speaker in Washington, DC, for the National Learning Center's 1995 Symposium. "Rethinking Childhood in the Age of Computers; What Happens When Every Child Has One?" Professor Papert is the inventor of Logo, a popular programming language that can be learned and creatively used by very young children. He also is the author of Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas, and The Children's Machine: Rethinking School on the Age of the Computer.
A life in education is hard to leave-even in retirement. Teachers from all parts of the US gathered in Tucson, AZ, last June for a conference on using system dynamics as a foundation for K-12 education. A special symposium honored Institute Professor Emeritus Gordon S. Brown, former dean of engineering, for his role in bringing system dynamics to a school system in Tucson, where he settled in retirement, thus encouraging its use in other schools around the country. Beginning at the Sloan School in the mid-1950s, system dynamics was developed by Dr. Jay W. Forrester, Germeshausen Professor Emeritus, who spoke at the symposium.
Also honored recently for teaching was Dr. Arnold Demain, professor of industrial microbiology in the Department of Biology, who received the Waksman Teaching Award from the Society of Industrial Biologists at its annual meeting earlier this month in San Jose, CA. The award will join two he has previously received from the Graduate Student Council in appreciation of outstanding teaching.
Dr. Robert J. McCunney, director of environmental medical services in the Medical Department, has been elected a director of the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, the nation's largest organization of occupational medicine physicians.Dr. McCunney also received a President's Award in recognition of his role as editor of the book, A Practical Approach to Occupational and Environmental Medicine, published by Little, Brown in 1994. The organization, founded in 1916, promotes worker and environmental health through preventive medicine, clinical practice, research and education.
Dr. Bruce D. Wedlock, director of the Lowell Institute School. was recently honored by the Richard C. Maclaurin Lodge of Masons based at MIT. He received the Joseph Warren Distinguished Service Medal which acknowledges distinguished and long-standing service to the Masonic fraternity. The medal is named for Dr. Joseph Warren, a Grand Master of Masons, who died at age 34 during the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on September 13, 1995.
