The Museum of Science on November 8 presented Professor Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder and director of the Media Lab, with the Bradford Washburn Award. The $10,000 award, named for explorer/cartographer and museum director from 1939-80, is given annually to one who has made an outstanding contribution toward public understanding of science. Previous winners have included Carl Sagan, Jane Goodall, Walter Cronkite and Jacques-Yves Cousteau.
In addition to serving on the board of directors for Motorola, Inc. and providing start-up funds for more than 20 companies, including Wired magazine, Professor Negroponte serves as chairman of the 2B1 Foundation, an organization dedicated to creating a world community focused on building a global network of the world's children. He is author of the 1995 best-seller Being Digital, which has been translated into more than 40 languages, and has been a member of the MIT faculty since 1966.
Glen Urban, the David Austin Professor of Marketing in the Sloan School, has won the Charles Coolidge Parlin Award from the American Marketing Association and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. It is given to "industry leaders who have expanded researchers' arsenals of concepts, methods and models for measurement; helped expand the use of existing methodologies; and demonstrated leadership in stimulating the use and appreciation of marketing research."
Professor Urban has co-authored five books and founded or co-founded five firms. An MIT faculty member since 1966, he was dean of the Sloan School from 1993-98.
Mark J. Kastantin, a freshman in chemical engineering from Trappe, MD, was awarded the $1,500 Buick-American Legion Baseball Leadership Scholarship as the 1999 Mid-Atlantic Region Player of the Year. In August, he was named the Maryland American Legion Player of the Year and received a $1,000 scholarship. Thescholarship is awarded to the American Legion baseball player who excels in scholarship, leadership, citizenship and character. He also worked at the NIH for two summers and coauthored an article about the use of pulse pressure to predict stroke, which appears in the September 1999 issue of the journal Hypertension.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on December 8, 1999.
