Laurels

PRESIDENTIAL ADVISER
President George W. Bush has appointed JUDITH ANSLEY, J80, F80, deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for regional affairs on the National Security Council. She had been a special assistant to the president and senior director for European affairs on the National Security Council.

DOCUMENTARY DIRECTOR
MOLLY BLANK, J98, was interviewed on NPR about her documentary Testing Hope: Grade 12 in the New South Africa, which chronicles four students’ struggles to pass an exam that determines whether they can go to a good college or pursue a trade. The test “means something about the rest of their lives,” Blank said. The interview is at www.npr.org (search on Mongamo).

U.S. AMBASSADOR
FREDERICK B. COOK, A72, was sworn in this summer as the U.S. Ambassador to the Central African Republic. Cook has worked in the State Department for 35 years, specializing in African affairs. Trustee VARNEY HINTLIAN, A72, Cook’s roommate at Tufts during their freshman and sophomore years, attended the ceremony in Washington, D.C., where Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer lauded Cook’s abilities.

HONORARY DEGREES
MADELINE DALTON, N85, N94, received an honorary doctor of science degree on May 12 from Alfred University, where she earned her undergraduate degree in biology in 1983. She also gave the university’s commencement address. A nutritional epidemiologist and associate professor of pediatrics at Dartmouth Medical School, Dalton has studied influences on teen smoking and on childhood obesity. DANIEL C. DENNETT, University Professor and professor of philosophy, was awarded an honorary doctor of science degree by McGill University. He is codirector of Tufts’ Center for Cognitive Studies.

RESEARCH FELLOWSHIPS
DIANA K. DAVIS, V94, an assistant professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin, has garnered two fellowships to support work on her book in progress, Imperialism and Environmental History in the Middle East: a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. Davis’s first book, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa (Ohio University Press), was published earlier this year.

UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT
JOHN E. ENDICOTT, F73, is the new president and vice chancellor of South Korea’s Woosong University, which has 7,000 undergraduate and graduate students. He is the first American president of a four-year private university in South Korea. Endicott was a professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and director of the Center for International Strategy, Technology, and Policy at Georgia Tech for the past 18 years. In 1991, he founded the Limited Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone for Northeast Asia, which seeks to permanently remove nuclear weapons from the Korean Peninsula, Japan, Taiwan, and Mongolia. Endicott and the program were nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2005.

NEW OVERSEERS
ALICE N. FINN, F86, F88, CEO of Ballentine, Finn & Company Inc., a financial planning and wealth management firm in Waltham, Massachusetts; CRAIG OWENS, F01, executive vice president and CFO of the Delhaize Group, a food retailer headquartered in Belgium; and FARAH A. PANDITH, F95, senior adviser to the assistant secretary for Europe and Eurasia in the State Department, have been appointed to the Board of Overseers to the Fletcher School. JEFFREY M. MOSLOW, A86, a partner with Goldman, Sachs & Company in New York City, has been named an overseer to the School of Arts & Sciences.

NOBEL MEETING
JODI GILMAN, A04, a graduate student in neuroscience at Brown University, was selected by the National Institutes of Health as one of four research participants to attend the 57th Lindau Meeting of Nobel Laureates and Students in Lindau, Germany.

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT
SHERWOOD L. GORBACH, M62, a pioneering researcher and educator who has shaped the discipline of infectious diseases for more than 40 years, is the recipient of the Infectious Diseases Society of America’s 2007 Alexander Fleming Award for Lifetime Achievement. He is a professor in the departments of community health and family medicine and molecular biology and microbiology at the School of Medicine, and a professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. Among his many research breakthroughs was the demonstration in the 1960s that a type of E. coli was a major cause of life-threatening diarrheal disease in the developing world. He discovered that the same bacterium was the cause of infantile diarrhea in Chicago—the first time the organism had been linked to severe pediatric diarrheal disease in the industrialized world—and of travelers’ diarrhea in Mexico. Along with colleagues John Bartlett and T-W Chang, he implicated the bacterium Clostridium difficile as the cause of antibiotic-associated diarrhea, described the first test for diagnosing the disease by the presence of the toxin, and showed that the antibiotic vancomycin was an effective treatment. Despite a career overflowing with laurels, Gorbach is not resting on any. He is the principal investigator on three NIH research projects, and he continues to teach, mentor, publish, edit, and contribute daily to the infectious diseases field he helped define over the past four decades. As one colleague noted, “He did it all, and he still does.”

FAMILY MEDICINE AWARD
JOSEPH W. GRAVEL JR., A82, M86, associate professor of public health and family medicine at Tufts School of Medicine and program director of the Tufts Family Medicine Residency Program at the Cambridge Health Alliance, received the Association of Family Medicine Residency Directors’ 2007 Gold Level Program Director Award. The award honors accomplishments in training residents, program performance, tenure, and legislative advocacy.

SCIENCE INNOVATOR
In a move to drive innovative biomedical research, the National Institutes of Health has awarded more than $105 million in funding to 41 exceptional investigators, including EKATERINA HELDWEIN, assistant professor of molecular biology and microbiology at Tufts School of Medicine. As a New Innovator Award honoree, she will receive $1.5 million in funding over five years to study, at the atomic level, how herpesviruses enter host cells.

ASHOKA FELLOW
FARHANA HUQ, J98, founder and CEO of Creating Economic Opportunities for Women (C.E.O. Women), has been awarded an Ashoka Fellowship, given to leading social entrepreneurs who devise innovative solutions to social problems. Huq founded C.E.O. Women in Oakland, California, in 2000 to help immigrant and refugee women start small businesses. Ashoka Fellows receive a stipend for three years so they can focus on building their institutions and disseminating their ideas.

BOOK PRIZES
AMY LEE-TAI, J89, received a 2007 Jane Addams Children’s Book Award for her novel, A Place Where Sunflowers Grow (Children’s Book Press, 2006), a bilingual story about a Japanese-American girl living in an internment camp in the United States during World War II. The awards are given annually by the Jane Addams Peace Society in New York City for exceptional children’s books that promote peace, social justice, world community, and gender and racial equality. HEATHER CURTIS, an assistant professor of comparative religion at Tufts, has won the Brewer Prize of the American Society of Church History for her book, Faith in the Great Physician: Suffering and Divine Healing in American Culture, 1860–1900 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). The prize is for the best first book on the history of Christianity. Before joining the university in September, Curtis was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Divinity School.

TEACHER IN CHINA
NEESHA MALLAVARAPU, A10, a sophomore biology major, spent the summer in China as a volunteer for the nonprofit WorldTeach, a competitive program to which she was admitted because of her commitment to education and to service. She taught English in two Chinese middle schools. As a volunteer with the Science Elementary Education Partners, she teaches science to third-graders in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and she spends three hours every Saturday helping Salvadoran immigrants prepare for the U.S. citizenship exam.

CHIEF JUSTICE
LAURA DENVIR STITH, J75, is the new chief justice of the Missouri Supreme Court, the second woman to hold the state’s top legal post. Stith is adept at translating complicated legal concepts into common-sense terms, said Hal Lowenstein, a Court of Appeals judge in Kansas City. Stith received her law degree from Georgetown University.

NUTRITION RECOGNITION
ALLEN TAYLOR, chief of the Laboratory for Nutrition and Vision Research at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging, received the Osborn and Mendel Award for Excellence in Nutrition Research from the American Society for Nutrition and the Denham Harmon Award for Excellence in Aging Research from the American Aging Association.

ENGINEERING DEAN
JOSEPH TEDESCO, G74, will become the sixth dean of the Cullen College of Engineering at the University of Houston on January 1, 2008. Currently professor and chair of civil and coastal engineering at the University of Florida, he specializes in structural engineering. He has been a six-time U.S. Air Force Research Fellow, working at research laboratories at Tyndall and Elgin Air Force Bases. He has taught at Auburn University, Oregon State University, and Lehigh University.