- Robert Sweeney, the William R. Mead Professor of Art, who has taught painting and drawing at Amherst for more than 30 years, exhibited his work from the past decade in the Eli Marsh Gallery on campus in January and February. (See his gallery talk at www.amherst.edu/magazine.)
- The physics department is a new beneficiary of federal stimulus money, thanks to a $350,000 National Science Foundation grant received by professors Jonathan Friedman, David Hall ’91 and Larry Hunter and UMass physicist Mark Tuominen. They will use the money to buy an electron-beam evaporation system, about the size of a small car, that will support work in areas such as quantum computing, ultra-low-temperature physics, materials science and nanoscience and nanotechnology.
- The college’s Mead Art Museum is working to conserve six Tibetan tangkas, cloth paintings of Buddhist deities mounted on silk scrolls. The project will eventually allow the long-hidden treasures—whose fragile condition has rendered them virtually inaccessible to scholars and other museum visitors for more than half a century—to be handled safely, studied and displayed.
- Andrew Bacevich, West Point graduate, veteran and Iraq war critic, will teach a course, “Ideas and American Foreign Policy,” at Amherst next fall as the John J. McCloy ’16 Professor of American Institutions and International Diplomacy. Meanwhile, theoretical astrophysicist Fulvio Melia will teach a fall course, “High-Energy Astrophysics,” as a John Woodruff Simpson Lecturer. Next spring Robert Kagan, a presidential-campaign adviser to John McCain, will be a McCloy Professor, offering a course on U.S.-world relations.
- Rob Benedetto, associate professor of mathematics, received $151,059 from the National Science Foundation to study mathematical problems that involve both dynamical systems and number theory.
- Dr. Charles R. Drew ’26 has a house on campus named after him, as well as a society. Further afield, several schools, a university and a bridge bear his name. Now the pioneering African-American surgeon and gifted athlete, who discovered the chemical method for preserving blood, has a Navy ship named for him, the 689-foot-long cargo ship Charles Drew.
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