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S&T Briefs
Distinguished Engineer
Elaine Surick Oran ’66, senior scientist for reactive flow physics at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, D.C., was elected to membership in the National Academy of Engineering on Feb. 14. Oran was cited by the NAE for her work on unifying engineering, scientific and mathematical disciplines into a computational methodology to solve challenging problems in aerospace combustion.
Election to the NAE, which is part of the National Academy of Sciences, is considered one of the highest professional distinctions an engineer can attain. According to the NAE, membership in the academy honors those who have made “important contributions to engineering theory and practice, including significant contributions to the literature of engineering theory and practice,” and those who have demonstrated accomplishment in “new fields of engineering, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education.”
A chemistry and physics major at Bryn Mawr, Oran went on to earn her master’s (1968) and Ph.D. (1972) degrees in physics at Yale University. Oran’s career and research were highlighted in the July 2002 issue of Bryn Mawr S&T, on the occasion of her induction into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame. The article can be accessed on the Bryn Mawr S&T Web site at http://www.brynmawr.edu/sandt/2002_july/briefs.html.
L’Oréal-UNESCO Laureate
 Ayse Erzan ’70, professor of physics at Istanbul Technical University, Turkey, received the 2003 L’Oréal-UNESCO Award at a Feb. 27 ceremony at UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris. The award annually recognizes five outstanding women scientists, one each from Africa, the Asia-Pacific, Europe, Latin America and North America. In addition to the five laureates, who receive a $100,000 award each, the L’Oréal-UNESCO Women in Science program provides $20,000 fellowships to 15 promising young women scientists each year.
Erzan was recognized for her innovative use of “the concepts of fractal geometry to study the collective phenomena of percolation, in which the interactions of simple constituents translate to behavior at large scales or over long periods” in a system that incorporates extremely large numbers of basic units. Such systems can include sand piles, chemical reactions, protein molecules, turbulent media or earthquakes.
A physics major at Bryn Mawr, Erzan went on to earn a Ph.D. in physics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1976. She returned to Turkey but left a few years later in the wake of a military coup. After working at institutions in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and Switzerland, Erzan returned to her homeland in 1990.
What’s in a Name?
 Associate Professor of Psychology Kimberly Cassidy received a three-year Academic Research Enhancement Award (AREA) grant of $144,569 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development for her research proposal, titled “Gender, Name Phonology and Children’s Stereotypes.”
English male and female forenames differ in various phonological dimensions, including length, accent patterns and phoneme composition. Prior research has indicated that child and adult English speakers learn these differences. Cassidy’s research will experimentally test three questions. First, does name phonology prime gender stereotypes in children and, if so, how does this stereotyping influence children’s judgments of others and the structure of gender categories? Second, do children receive evidence in storybooks and other sources for linking name phonology with gender stereotypes? Finally, how are phonological cues to gender learned?
Cassidy’s research and career were profiled in the July 2001 issue of Bryn Mawr S&T, which can be accessed on the S&T Web site at http://www.brynmawr.edu/sandt/2001_july/mind.html.
All-USA Collegian
Charlotte Rahn-Lee ’05, a double major in biology and French, was one of 60 undergraduate students named by USA Today to its All-USA College Academic Team on Feb. 13. The contest recognizes “students who excel not only in scholarship but also in leadership roles on and off campus,” says USA Today, with particular attention given to “a student’s outstanding original academic or intellectual product.” Rahn-Lee was named to the third team.
Rahn-Lee’s nomination for the award cited her play, All That We See or Seem, which won the Young Playrights Festival National Playwriting Competition in 2002. The play is “about reality, nonreality and how — or whether — we can tell the difference,” says Rahn-Lee. “One of the characters realizes that he’s a character in a play and draws an analogy to the cave in Plato’s Republic.”
This semester, Rahn-Lee is taking courses in developmental biology, organic chemistry and French, as well as a College Seminar on “Classical Mythology and the Contemporary World.” For the past two summers, she has worked at a plant genetics lab at Cornell University’s Agricultural Experiment Station in her hometown, Geneva, N.Y., with her twin sister, Lilah Rahn-Lee ’05.
“We went through a bunch of seeds of tomato plants that have the same colloquial name to determine whether they were similar enough to categorize as one variety” by comparing DNA sequences to see how closely they matched, Rahn-Lee explains. “The second summer, we were looking at a specific gene that codes for the production of lycopine, the pigment that makes tomatoes red. We attempted to correlate the allele with the phenotype”
Rahn-Lee plans to spend this summer at Bryn Mawr’s program in Avignon, France. Asked whether she has written a play about biology, Rahn-Lee replies that she has made a few attempts she finds unsatisfactory. “But someday I’ll get it right,” she promises.
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