Endowed Chairs and Named Professorships

The following elections to endowed positions were made by the Cornell Board of Trustees' Academic Affairs and Campus Life committee and reported to the full board at its March meeting.

Carpenter

Barry K. Carpenter, professor and chair of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology in the College of Arts and Sciences, was elected the Horace White Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, effective April 1, 2004.

The chair is named for the father of Andrew Dickson White, the first president of Cornell.

Carpenter's research focuses on the mechanisms of chemical reactions. His research group, whose approach combines theoretical and experimental techniques, is interested in taking advantage of modern computing power to revisit some of the theories of chemical reactions and to remove some of the approximations that had to be made during the development of those theories in earlier years. "It turns out that some of the approximations did not work as well as people thought, and so we are having to revise some of the ways that we think about how chemical reactions occur," Carpenter said.

"The study of reaction mechanisms is very basic science, but in part because of that, it has applications to widely varying real-world problems," he said.

Carpenter has ongoing collaborations with Fred McLafferty, chemistry and chemical biology professor emeritus, on the determination of protein structures by mass spectrometry; with George Hess, professor of biochemistry, on the development of reagents for understanding the action of neurons; and with Hector Abruña, the E.M. Chamot Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, and Frank DiSalvo, the J.A. Newman Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, on the development of new fuel cells.

Born in England, Carpenter was educated at Warwick University, where he graduated in 1970 with a B.Sc. in molecular sciences (first class honors). He earned his Ph.D. in organic chemistry at University College, London, in 1973. For the next two years he was a postdoctoral researcher with J.A. Berson at Yale University.

Carpenter joined the Cornell Department of Chemistry in 1975 as an assistant professor, rising to associate professor in 1981 and full professor in 1985.

His many awards include Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowships. He won the Alexander von Humboldt Senior Scientist Award in 1990, the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award from the American Chemical Society (ACS) in 1997 and the James Flack Norris Award from the ACS in 1999. He also won the Stephen and Margery Russell Teaching Award in 1992. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Carpenter is a member of the editorial advisory boards of Journal of the American Chemical Society, Accounts of Chemical Research and Organic and Biomolecular Chemistry and is a former associate editor of Journal of Organic Chemistry. And he is a consultant for Eastman Kodak and Bristol-Myers Squibb.

Laquatra

Joseph Laquatra, professor of design and environmental analysis in the College of Human Ecology, was elected the Hazel E. Reed Human Ecology Extension Professor in Family Policy, effective Jan. 5, 2004, for a five-year term.

The professorship was established by the College of Human Ecology in 1998 in honor of the late Hazel Reed, a former Cornell professor, to provide leadership in policy issues affecting families and communities in New York state.

Laquatra has more than 25 years of experience working with the building industry in the areas of housing technology and environmental design. His research has focused on the technical and socioeconomic aspects of housing, with major emphases on energy efficiency, indoor air quality, housing affordability and environmental issues. His outreach efforts involve practical applications of his research to the work of extension educators, housing professionals, home buyers and government agencies, among others.

Laquatra joined the Cornell faculty in 1984. He received a B.S. (1974) in hotel administration, and M.S. (1982) and Ph.D. (1984) degrees in consumer economics and housing, all from Cornell. Between his undergraduate and graduate studies, he worked as a VISTA volunteer, a builder in the private sector and a housing director at a nonprofit human services agency.

Hazel Reed, for whom the chair is named, joined the College of Home Economics (now the College of Human Ecology) in 1949 in Cornell Cooperative Extension. An assistant New York state leader of home demonstration agents, she encouraged the development of innovative home economics programs at the state and local levels. She retired from Cornell in 1967 and died in 1997.