Notables

Katharine B. (Katy) Payne, visiting fellow at the Lab of Ornithology's Bioacoustics Research Program, has been named the winner of a 2004 Earth Women of Discovery Award by the Wings Trust. The prize, which honors Payne's pioneering studies of sound communication among whales and, more recently, among forest elephants of Africa, will be conferred March 3, 2004, in New York City. The mission of Wings Trust is to celebrate the contributions of extraordinary women explorers. Others slated to receive Wings Trust awards include astrophysicist Vera Rubin, oceanographer Marie Tharp and archaeologist Iris Love.

The 2003 John von Neumann Theory Prize of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science has been awarded jointly to Michael J. Todd, the Leon C. Welch Professor of Operations Research and Engineering, and Arkadi Nemirovski of Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. The award cites their "seminal and profound contributions to continuous optimization." Todd's research focuses on optimization algorithms -- that is, computer methods for analyzing systems in which there are many interrelated variables and finding the best way to combine them. Applications range from controlling the flow of parts in a factory to scheduling school bus routes, political redistricting, allocating capital investments or designing electronic circuits. Todd is regarded as one of the fundamental contributors to the now well-established field of linear programming, which is a way of simplifying problems that involve so many different combinations of variables that computer solutions would take a lifetime. Today he is pioneering in new interior-point methods, which provide shortcuts for dealing with problems in many dimensions.

Richard A. Durst, professor of chemistry in the department of Food Science and Technology at the Cornell's New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, N.Y., has been appointed to serve on the Food Advisory Committee to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The term will last three years. The Food Advisory Committee is a technical and scientific committee that advises the FDA in discharging its responsibilities as they relate to issues of food safety, food science and applied nutrition, and as required, any product for which the FDA has regulatory responsibility. The committee provides advice primarily to the director of the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition and as needed to the Commissioner of Food and Drugs and other appropriate officials, on emerging food safety, food science, nutrition and other food-related health issues that the FDA considers important.

To help families better cope with asthma and to improve indoor environmental health, Joe Laquatra, professor of design and environmental analysis, will use a grant of up to $70,000 for 18 months from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to work with 120 Syracuse families with children suffering from asthma. He will train peer educators in partnership with Cornell Cooperative Extension in Onondaga County to teach affected families the role and control of asthma triggers in the home. The grant is part of an $850,000 award to the New York Indoor Environmental Quality Center (NYIEQ), State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY-ESF), Upstate Medical University and Cornell. It will fund an intervention study to evaluate new cleaning technologies, provide asthma prevention education to residents and determine the effectiveness of various air quality improvement devices aimed at reducing childhood exposure to asthma agents and improving indoor environmental quality in general.