Professor of Materials Science Linn W. Hobbs has been awarded an honorary OBE (Officer, Order of the British Empire) by Queen Elizabeth. The honour was presented by British Ambassador Sir Christopher Meyer in a ceremony at the British Embassy in Washington earlier this month. Hobbs was awarded the honor in recognition of his services to British-American relations in education through his work on the Marshall Scholarships.
Hobbs, a 1966 Marshall scholar, has been a research fellow of Wolfson College and a visiting professor at Balliol College (both at Oxford University); he worked at the UK Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell. He joined the Boston selection committee for the Marshall Scholarships in 1985 and has served as its chair since 1989. He is a past president of the Oxford and Cambridge Society of New England.
At the annual conference of the National Association of Graduate-Professional Students (NAGPS) this month, MIT's Graduate Student Council won two out of the three awards for "stellar contributions to graduate and professional education."
The first was awarded for "Welcome to MIT--the school and its community." This includes graduate orientation, the international student mentoring program, the international student pickup shuttle service and Grad School 101. The second award went to Graduate Student Volunteer Day, at which the GSC brought together various community-service student groups. That program attracted hundreds of students who participated in more than 15 different projects. At the conference, the GSC was invited to give a plenary session presentation on "Enhancing the Graduate School Experience."
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on November 28, 2001.
