Visiting Professor Ernesto J. Cortes Jr. and Institute Professor John Harbison will each receive $250,000 as two of the five winners of the Heinz Family Foundation Award for civic and academic achievements, it was announced Tuesday.
Professor Cortes, winner of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 1984, is a Dr. Martin Luther King Visiting Professor at MIT this year. He received the award for achievements in public policy. He is the southwest director of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) in Austin, TX, an institution founded by Saul Alinsky in Chicago in the 1940s that provides leadership training for poor and moderate-income people.
Professor Harbison, one of America's leading composers, received the award for achievements in the arts and humanities. He has been a member of the MIT music faculty since 1969. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his composition The Flight Into Egypt in 1987 and a MacArthur Fellowship in 1989. He was the 1994-95 recipient of the James R. Killian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award, and in 1995 he was named Institute Professor, a title that MIT reserves for about 12 scholars of special distinction.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on January 28, 1998.
