People Briefs

Harvey M. Florman has been appointed to the faculty of the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology in Shrewsbury, Mass., as a staff scientist. He comes from the University of Wisconsin, where he was a senior scientist. Florman is a reproductive biologist with particular interest and expertise in the study of sperm-egg interactions. He holds a grant from the National Institutes of Health for a research program concerned with sperm binding receptors on mammalian eggs, and will be affiliated with the Worcester Foundation's Male Fertility Program. The Worcester Foundation, best known for the development of the birth control pill, is currently focusing on cancer and cell biology, neurobiology, and endocrine-reproductive biology. Florman is a graduate of Rutgers University and received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He completed postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School. Mark Wrighton, head of the department of chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been named the first recipient of the CIBA-GEIGY Professorship and Research Endowment in Chemistry. CIBA-GEIGY, an Ardsley, N.Y.-based pharmaceutical company, established a $3 million fund for both a professorial chair and a research endowment at the school. Wrighton's research includes attempts to convert solar energy directly into electricity or chemical energy by seeking to mimic chemically the process by which plants convert sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into energy. Wrighton received his B.S. degree in chemistry in 1969 at Florida State University. From there, he went on to the California Institute of Technology and completed his doctorate by the age of 22. He joined the MIT faculty in 1972 as an assistant professor of chemistry. Janet Osteryoung, professor of chemistry at the State University of New York at Buffalo, has won the Anachem Award, one of analytical chemistry's oldest national awards. Since 1953, the Association of Analytical Chemists of Detroit has given the award annually to recognize outstanding contributions to analytical chemistry. Osteryoung is only the third woman to receive it. Her expertise is in electroanalytical chemistry, a discipline that uses pulses of electricity to measure and characterize compounds at extremely low levels. She is currently implementing electrochemical techniques to develop corrosion-resistant coatings that can be applied to metals without using toxic chemicals. Osteryoung earned her bachelor's degree from Swarthmore College and her Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology. Ernst Meyer, formerly of BASF-AG of West Germany, has been selected to receive the 1990 Herman Skolnik Award of the American Chemical Society's Division of Chemical Information. The award was established in 1976 at the ACS Centennial Meeting in New York to recognize outstanding contributions to and achievements in the theory and practice of chemical information science, and was named after its first recipient. Meyer, who retired in 1987, has played a major role in revolutionizing chemical information handling through the use of computer methodology since the late 1950s. He has been a leader in the development of input and the searching techniques for topological and fragment representations of chemical substances, including generic or Markush representations, intended to be used for large-scale operations. He earned his doctorate at the University of Göttingen in 1952. James Sternberg, staff scientist in clinical chemistry and immunology at the Fullerton, Calif.-based Beckman Instruments Inc., an analytical instrument company, has been appointed vice president of the newly formed Beckman Advanced Technology Department. One of his duties will be to represent the corporation to the external world on scientific affairs and advise senior management on scientific matters such as technical strategy, innovation, and technology transfer. He will also explore technological concepts and guide product development for bioresearch applications with potential for the diagnostics market. Sternberg earned his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in physical chemistry from Harvard University, where he specialized in photochemistry, kinetics, and gas and liquid chromatography. Peter J. Denning, director of the Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., recently was presented with the Association for Computing Machinery's 1989 ACM Distinguished Service Award. Denning was cited by the ACM awards committee for his contributions to the computing profession. His primary research areas are computer systems architecture, parallel computation, operating systems, and performance modeling. Denning's column, "The Science of Computing," appears regularly in American Scientist. He earned his B.E.E. degree from Manhattan College in 1964 and his Ph.D. and S.M. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's electrical engineering department in 1968 and 1965. Michel M. Ter-Pogossian, head of the division of radiation sciences at Washington University's Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology, has been named Amy Bowles Lawrence Distinguished Scientist in Research Medicine. The selection was made by the Donner Laboratory, a division of biology and medicine of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. The award honors Ter-Pogossian's pioneering role in developing the use of cyclotron-produced radionuclides in biomedical research. Ter-Pogossian developed PET (positron emission tomography), which produces an image of function rather than form, in the early 1970s at Mallinckrodt; he is referred to as the "father of PET." During his 10 years of experimenting with PET, Ter-Pogossian and his colleagues have developed multiple techniques for measuring blood flow, blood volume, oxygen metabolism, and glucose metabolism. He attended the Sorbonne and the Institute of Radium in France and received his M.S. and Ph.D. in nuclear physics at Washington University. Peter M. Banks, a space researcher at Stanford University, has been appointed dean of the University of Michigan College of Engineering. Currently, Banks is professor of electrical engineering, director of the Space, Telecommunications, and Radioscience Laboratory, and director of the Center of Aeronautics and Space Information Sciences at Stanford. He will begin his term at the University of Michigan on July 1. His research endeavors have focused on the study of global change issues; he has led many national and international research programs on space and atmospheric research. Banks previously was head of the physics department at Utah State University in 1976-81 and has been a member of the Stanford faculty since 1981. He received his M.S. degree in electrical engineering from Stanford in 1960 and his Ph.D. in physics from Penn State University in 1965. He did postdoctoral training at the Belgian Institute of Space Aeronomy in 1965-66.

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April 1990

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