Two MIT professors and a Harvard University researcher are the winners of the 1995 Edward A. Hewitt Prize awarded by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies.
Professors Paul L. Joskow and Richard Schmalensee, along with Natalia Tsukanova of the Russian Privatization Center in Moscow, were honored for their article on "Competition Policy in Russia During and After Privatization," published in the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity.
Dr. Joskow is Mitsui Professor of Economics and head of the department. Dr. Schmalensee is Gordon Y Billard Professor of Management and Economics and director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research.
The award commemorates a scholar in Slavic studies who, when he died in January 1993, was serving in Washington as the President's special assistant and senior advisor for Russian and Eurasian affairs. It is awarded annually "for an outstanding publication on the political economy of the centrally planned economies of the former Soviet Union and East Central Europe and their transitional successors."
The award committee described the winning 1995 publication as "a masterful introduction to the economic analysis of the industrial organization of Russia in the early stages of its transformation from a command to a market economy."
----------
Dr. Judith Jarvis Thomson, Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy, will be in residence during the spring semester at the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. She will give an address to the academy on February 8 and, in April, will give the 1996 Hagerstrom Lectures at the University of Uppsala in Sweden.
----------
MIT's name will be enhanced this year by David L. Millay, senior manager of mechanical services in Physical Plant, who is serving as president of the American Institute of Plant Engineers. Mr. Millay will lead the 8,500-member organization through a name change as it becomes the Association for Facilities Engineering. A certified plant engineer, Mr. Millay is part of the management team that keeps MIT's 9.5 million square feet of space operating. He has been at MIT since 1982 and has long been active in the professional organization and its training programs. He was selected plant engineer of the year by the Boston chapter in 1993.
----------
Two MIT graduate students were among 10 young scientists who received 1995 Fall Graduate Students Awards from the Materials Research Society (MRS). The awards-plaques and cash honoraria-recognize and encourage graduate students "whose academic achievements and current materials research display a high order of excellence and distinction." The MIT recipients were Patrick D. Tepesch in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Yongwu Yang in the Department of Chemistry.
----------
Dr. Harold J. Hanham, former dean of the School of Humanities and Social Science (1973-84), has been awarded an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Lancaster University. Professor Hanham recently retired from 10 years of service as vice chancellor of the university.
----------
A team of MIT students has advanced to the February 17 international finals of the Association for Computing Machinery programming contest after finishing second at the northeast regional contest late last year. The teams from MIT and Harvard, which finished first after a judging reversal, were the only entrants to finish all seven programming problems in the allotted five hours. MIT team members are electrical engineering and computer science sophomores Scott Smith and Brian Dean, who was on last year's team, and Matt Levine, a graduate student at the Laboratory for Computer Science. The coaches are Assistant Professor Bonnie Berger and Professor Tom Leighton of mathematics and the LCS, and Frans Kaashoek, Jamieson Career Development Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and a former internationals competitor himself.
