Dr. JoAnne Stubbe, John G. Sheehan Professor of Chemistry and professor of biology, has won the Theodore William Richards Medal for 1996.
The Richards Medal is awarded every two years by the Northeastern Section of the American Chemical Society for conspicuous achievement in chemistry.
"Professor Stubbe has made outstanding contributions to our understanding of how enzymes work, an area of great importance to bioorganic chemistry and biology," the award committee said.
The award is named after Theodore William Richards, a Nobel laureate in chemistry in 1914 and a professor of physical chemistry at Harvard. Presentation of the medal to Professor Stubbe will take place on March 14 at the Harvard Science Center.
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A widely acclaimed book on negative political advertising co-authored by Dr. Stephen D. Ansolabehere, assistant professor of political science, has been selected as the winner of the 1995 Goldsmith Book Prize.
The $5,000 prize is awarded annually to the author or authors of "the best book that aims at improving the quality of government or politics through an examination of the press and government or the intersection of press and politics in the formation of public policy."
The Goldsmith Awards Program, which includes prizes for investigative reporting and excellence in journalism, is administered by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
One of the central findings of Going Negative: How Political Advertisements Shrink and Polarize the Electorate (The Free Press, New York) is that negative ads drive independent voters away from the ballot box. Professor Ansolabehere wrote the book with Professor Shanto Iyengar of the University of California at Los Angeles, where he taught before coming to MIT.
The book's conclusions are based on surveys and experiments involving California voters, using ads from the 1990 and 1992 gubernatorial and senatorial campaigns.
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Dr. Regis M.N. Pelloux, professor emeritus of materials engineering, has been elected an honorary Fellow and Life Member of the International Fatigue Congress Series.
The honor recognizes Professor Pelloux's "significant contributions to the understanding of fatigue crack growth mechanisms in metals." He will be formally recognized at the next International Fatigue Congress in Berlin in May.
The Congress is the largest international forum for the presentation of research in the general area of fatigue of metals. Dr. Subra Suresh, Richard P. Simmons Professor of Metallurgy and professor of mechanical engineering, has been invited to deliver the closing plenary lecture at this year's meeting.
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One of 10 scholars giving talks at the 17th annual Salem State College Darwin Festival is Dr. Heidi B. Hammel, a principal research scientist in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.
Dr. Hammel led a Hubble Space Telescope team that investigated Jupiter's atmospheric response to its collision with fragments of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. Her talk is entitled "The Comet Crash of 1994: Its Effects on Jupiter and on Earth."
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on March 6, 1996.
