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S&T Briefs
Premier Courseware
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Deepak Kumar |
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The College's Pyro Robotics Project was a co-winner of the 2005 Premier Award for Excellence in Engineering Education Courseware. Sponsored by the National Science Foundation's Synthesis Education Engineering Coalition, the National Engineering Education Delivery System (NEEDS) and John Wiley & Sons, the award recognizes high-quality, noncommercial courseware designed to enhance engineering education.
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Doug Blank |
The Pyro project is an extension of the Beyond LEGOs Program developed by Deepak Kumar and Doug Blank, associate and assistant professors of computer science, respectively, and their Swarthmore College colleague Lisa Meeden, supported by a three-year $400,000 NSF grant. The program includes hardware, software and curricular components to develop research-level robotics and artificial intelligence courseware that incorporates new ideas on how to teach machines to learn. The program was featured in the April 2003 issue of Bryn Mawr S&T.
Fletcher Fellow
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Nina G. Jablonski '75 |
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Nina G. Jablonski '75, curator and chair of the anthropology department at the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, was among the first group of Alphonse Fletcher Sr. Fellows, awarded by Alphonse Fletcher Jr., chair and chief executive officer of Fletcher Asset Management, on April 15, 2005. The fellowships, which include a stipend of $50,000, are awarded to individuals whose work contributes to improving race relations in American society and advances the broad social goals of the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Jablonski received the fellowship for improving public understanding of the biological and social meaning of skin color. Her research, conducted with her husband George Chaplin, demonstrated that skin color is an evolutionary adaptation — a product of natural selection acting to regulate melanin-pigment levels in the skin relative to levels of ultraviolet radiation in the environment. In her profile in the summer 2003 issue of the Alumnae Bulletin, Jablonski said: “We can take a topic that has caused so much disagreement, so much suffering, and so much misunderstanding, and completely disarm it. We're all the same under the skin…. It isn't a social stigma. It's something that evolved in our ancestors for a good set of biological reasons. And it takes the wind out of racism and bigotry.”
NAS Member
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Susan Band Horwitz '58 |
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Susan Band Horwitz '58 was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences on May 3, 2005. Election to membership in the academy is considered one of the highest honors that can be accorded to a U.S. scientist or engineer.
Among her many scientific achievements, Horwitz determined how the anti-cancer drug Taxol slows tumor growth. Her work encouraged the National Cancer Institute to pursue Taxol as a promising new antitumor drug and eventually led to approval by the Food and Drug Administration for its use in treating ovarian, breast and lung cancers. Horwitz is the Falkenstein Professor of Cancer Research and co-chair of the department of molecular pharmacology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York. She was profiled in the July 2001 issue of Bryn Mawr S&T.
AAAS Member
Roselyn Goldberg Eisenberg '60 was elected a 2004 fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world's largest general scientific organization and publisher of the journal Science. The new fellows were highlighted on Feb. 19, 2005, at the Fellows Forum of the AAAS annual meeting in Washington , D.C. Election as a fellow is an honor bestowed on members by their peers in recognition of outstanding efforts to advance science or its applications.
Eisenberg is a professor and head of the laboratory of microbiology and immunology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, Philadelphia . Her research examines how herpes simplex virus enters susceptible cells of animal models, and how pathogenesis of the virus is promoted in human hosts.
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