��������� Robert A. Weinberg, the Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research and the American Cancer Society Professor of Biology, and Institute Professor Sheila Widnall, the Abbe Rockefeller Mauz� Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, are among the 42 new members elected to the American Philosophical Society on April 29. Founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1743, the organization is the oldest learned society in the United States devoted to the advancement of scientific and scholarly inquiry.
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��������� Professor Widnall also recently received the Reed Aeronautics Award, the highest honor bestowed by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics for notable achievement in aeronautical science and engineering. Professor Widnall's citation recognizes her as "a noted researcher, engineering educator, Secretary of the United States Air Force, and proponent of streaming government aerospace procurement." At the awards banquet, she was also installed as the organization's incoming president.
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��������� MIT has received a check for $218,285 from the ExxonMobil Foundation, a figure that represents the foundation's three-to-one match of 140 ExxonMobil employee, retiree, surviving spouse and director gifts to MIT. Meg O'Neill (SB 1994), senior research engineer at ExxonMobil Upstream Research Co., presented the check to Provost Robert Brown. A total of 882 colleges and universities participate in the foundation's matching gift program; MIT is among its top 10 grant recipients.
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��������� Marvin Minsky, the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, is one of three recipients of the R.W. Wood Prize from the Optical Society of America. The award recognizes outstanding discovery, scientific or technological achievement, or invention in the field of optics. Professor Minsky and two others were cited "for seminal contributions to confocal microscopy."
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��������� Institute Professor Emeritus Robert M. Solow, who won the Nobel prize in economics in 1987, received an honorary degree (Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa) from New York University at its Commencement ceremony on May 11. Five others, including best-selling author Frank McCourt (Angela's Ashes, 'Tis) also received honorary degrees.
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��������� Assistant Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience Anthony D. Wagner has been selected as an Ellison Medical Foundation New Scholar. He will receive the award at the foundation's Colloquium on the Biology of Aging at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA in August.
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��������� Brown University has bestowed one of three Distinguished Graduate School Alumnus/a Awards on Professor of French Studies Isabelle de Courtivron of the foreign languages and literatures (FLL) section. Professor de Courtivron received the PhD from Brown in 1973. A leader in the field of French women's writing and French feminism, she is former head of the Program in Women's Studies and FLL and a past winner of the Harold Edgerton Award for Outstanding Teaching and Research.
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��������� The MIT Museum has received a $10,000 Conservation Project Support grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The grant will be used to conduct a detailed survey of the architectural drawings collections of architects Marjorie Pierce and Richard Filipowski, and to better protect those collections. The museum's architectural collections include drafting tools, books, portfolios, ceramics and an extensive drawings collection. The IMLS is a federal grant-making agency that fosters leadership, innovation and learning by supporting the country's museums and libraries.
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��������� Professor James G. Fox of the Division of Bioengineering and Environmental Health, director of the Division of Comparative Medicine, will receive the American Veterinary Medical Asso-ciation's Foundation Award for Excellence in Research at a meeting of the organization in Salt Lake City in July. His primary research interest is in infectious diseases of the gastrointestinal tract and their oncogenic potential.
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��������� A paper by graduate student Jacopo Buongiorno, Professor Neil Todreas of nuclear engineering and mechanical engineering, and Professor Mujid Kazimi of nuclear engineering titled "Void Fraction Prediction for the Pb-Bi/Water Direct Contact Nuclear Reactor" won the Best Technical Paper award at the eighth International Conference on Nuclear Engineering (ICONE-8) in April.
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��������� Professor Wesley L. Harris of aeronautics and astronautics has received the newly created Alumni Community Service Award from the Princeton Association of New England. Professor Harris, who received the MA in 1966 and the PhD in 1968 from Princeton, was recognized for "his long and distinguished career in teaching and his service to Princeton in his various leadership roles." The award coincides with this year's centennial of the Princeton University Graduate School.
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��������� InMeeting.com, a provider of a broadband collaborative application platform and services founded by a team of MIT graduate students headed by Associate Professor Feniosky Pe�a-Mora of civil and environmental engineering, was awarded the $25,000 grand prize in UniversityAngels.com's first $50,000 business plan competition for student and alumni entrepreneurs. The company's product enables organizations to create geographically distributed "virtual" teams that can collaborate over the Internet in real time using multiple devices such as computers, cell phones and personal digital assistants.
EyeGen, winner of MIT's recent $50K Entrepreneurship Competition (MIT Tech Talk, May 17, 2000), won the $15,000 second prize. UniversityAngels.com operates a network of more than 25 university-specific web sites dedicated to connecting qualified "angel" investors with alumni/ae and student entrepreneurs from top academic institutions.
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��������� The first holder of the Michael S. Dukakis Chair in Public Policy and Service at the American College of Thessaloniki (ACT) will be Professor Eugene B. Skolnikoff, former chair of the Department of Political Science, starting in September. Professor Skolnikoff's expertise includes nuclear energy and weapons, international science, global warming and information technologies, as well as the interrelationship between technological and political change. The Dukakis chair was inaugurated in September 1999 by former Gov. Michael Dukakis and sponsored a series of four seminars in the area of public policy and service in 1999-2000.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on June 7, 2000.
