Three professors of chemistry, Barry Carpenter, Jon Clardy and David Collum, were honored with Cope Scholar Awards by the American Chemical Society at the organization's September national meeting in Las Vegas. Cope Scholar Awards recognize and encourage excellence in organic chemistry and offer $25,000 unrestricted research grants. Carpenter was cited for his insights into the fundamental ways that substances -- from simple atoms to complex proteins -- react with each other. Clardy was honored for his efforts to find new drugs in nature that can fight cancer and other diseases. Collum was cited for his achievements in revealing how highly unstable but critical compounds can be harnessed to make new pharmaceutical drugs.
Anne Kendall, director of the Dietetic Program in the Division of Nutritional Sciences and recently elected president of the New York State Dietetic Association, is the recipient of the 1997 Distinguished Dietitian Award from that association. She was cited for "her expert leadership, her contributions to the profession of dietetics and her years of outstanding service and dedication to the Association." As the new director of the Dietetic Program at Cornell, Kendall oversees Cornell's American Dietetic Association-approved undergraduate program, one of the oldest in the country, and Cornell's new ADA-accredited Dietetic Internship, which offers postgraduate experiential training to qualify students to sit for the exam for Registered Dietitians. Previously, Kendall was a research associate in the Division of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell for seven years.
Larry Palmer, professor of law, has been named as a member of the board of directors of the American Medical Association's National Patient Safety Foundation (NPSF). The NPSF hopes to improve health care safety by studying how medical mistakes occur and implementing safeguards to prevent errors from injuring patients. Board members represent the health care industry as well as consumer advocacy groups, medical ethicists, trial lawyers and scientific research institutions. Palmer teaches medical ethics to undergraduate, law and medical students. He served as executive producer of Susceptible to Kindness: 'Miss Ever's Boys' and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, an educational video that examines issues raised by the controversial study on the effects of untreated syphilis on some 400 impoverished African American males, and he is the author of Law, Medicine and Social Justice and numerous articles relating to law, science medicine and public policy.
Sarah Thomas, the Carl A. Kroch University Librarian, was elected in May to a three-year term to the board of directors of the Research Libraries Group (RLG), Mountain View, Calif. The RLG, founded in 1974, is an international not-for-profit membership corporation of 155 member institutions devoted to the mission of "improving access to information that supports research and learning." The board of directors is responsible for the strategic management of the activities, property and affairs of the corporation.
Dick R. Wittink, the Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Management at the Johnson Graduate School of Management, has been honored by the European Marketing Academy for the best article published in the International Journal of Research in Marketing in 1996. The paper, "Competitive Reaction versus Consumer Response: Do Managers Overreact?" written with Professor Peter S.H. Leeflang of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, shows that managers in an oligopolistic market react excessively to each other's activities.