Notables

A team of Cornell Cooperative Extension educators, including Barbara J. Bristow, an extension associate in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management, is the recipient of a first place national award from the National Extension Association of Family and Consumer Sciences for its Financial Fitness Workbook, given to Money 2000 participants. Money 2000 is a statewide initiative through Cornell Cooperative Extension county offices to provide financial education, money management skills and financial counseling. The 56-page workbook helps participants work toward their financial goals by helping them develop a spending a plan, manage debt, keep financial records and track their net worth. Team members include Bristow; Martha Shortlidge, Westchester County; Barbara Henza, Cortland County; Eileen Ciance, Washington County; Christine Schmitz, Wayne/Ontario counties; Tebbie Clift, Nassau County; Mary Misek, Lewis County; and Lisa Verstandig, Albany County.

The International Society of Chemical Ecology presented Alan Renwick with the Silverstein-Simeone Award for Outstanding Research in Chemical Ecology at the group's international meeting in Marseille, France, Nov. 16. Renwick is a senior scientist at the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research Inc. In accepting the award Renwick, who is also an adjunct professor of entomology at Cornell, gave a lecture focusing on how plant chemicals change the taste sensation for insects, offering potential biochemical insight into how human taste develops and deteriorates over a lifetime.

George Hess, professor of biochemistry in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, has been appointed a Fogarty Scholar for 1999-2000 at the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke, a component of the National Institutes of Health. Under the redesigned Fogarty Scholars program, the criteria an institute must now use to select a scholar include the "capacity to interact with the NIH scientific community" and "evidence of planned interaction with one or more Special Interest Groups." Hess is spending a sabbatical leave this semester at the Max-Planck Institutes for Biophysical Research and for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany, supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and at NIH. In Germany and at NIH he is transferring two separate techniques developed in his laboratory to study the way in which signals in the nervous system are controlled.