Grants Authorized 2005

Marin Alsop, Conductor. Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Poole, England
Marin Alsop, principal conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and music director of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, is among the most accomplished conductors working today. In addition to her masterful conducting technique and visionary artistic programming, Alsop is distinguished by her extraordinary ability to communicate, both with her orchestra and with her audience, successfully translating her musical ideas into symphonic sound with a signature style. In presenting concerts, she often addresses audiences directly and previews short passages demonstrating themes and motifs of pieces to be played. These engaging presentations demystify challenging music for a wide range of audiences. While honoring classical music heritage, Alsop is also deeply committed to bringing the work of living composers to orchestras, audiences, and critics around the world. Her discography ranges from gospel recordings to traditional symphonies to the music of contemporary American composers. Through her musicality, her skill in making the unusual understandable, and her championing of contemporary music, Alsop defies stereotypes and offers a new model of leadership for orchestras in the U.S. and abroad.

Ted Ames, Fisherman. Stonington, Maine
Ted Ames, a long-term, Maine lobster and ground fisherman, has fused the roles of fisherman and applied scientist in response to increasing threats to the fishery ecosystem resulting from decades of over-harvesting. Ames grew up in a fishing family on one of Maine’s remote offshore islands and studied biochemistry at the University of Maine. Having spent several decades of his life at sea, he has witnessed dramatic shifts in the economic landscape throughout the Gulf of Maine, specifically in jobs and shoreside infrastructure. In an effort to address these changes and develop new fisheries management practices for the affected areas, Ames undertook detailed studies of spawning, habitat, and fishing patterns. His studies, reinforced by a rigorous methodology, draw distinctively from the anecdotal experiences of aging fishermen to map historical patterns and chart the evolution of current conditions. His work paints a scientifically compelling picture of the complexity of the fish population structure in the Gulf and identifies new strategies for individual and institutional marine management in the region. Ames has now established the Penobscot East Resource Center to conduct additional studies of fishing patterns, past and present, and put to further use his trademark approach of combining fishery science and fishermen’s knowledge in the interest of protecting essential fish habitats.

Terry Belanger, Rare Book Preservationist. University Professor and Honorary Curator of Special Collections, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia
Terry Belanger is a historian, collector, and protector of one of humankind’s greatest inventions: the book. To support the study of the book’s long history, Belanger created a teaching and archive facility, the Rare Book School (RBS), in 1983 as part of Columbia University’s School of Library Service; in 1992, he moved it to its current home at the University of Virginia. The RBS functions as an independent, nonprofit institute devoted to the histories of manuscripts, print, electronic text, and everything in between. It transcends the limitations of traditional degree programs by making its wide-ranging offerings available to a broad range of professionals interested in studying and preserving these cultural artifacts; historians, literary scholars, librarians, conservators, collectors, and book artists attend RBS courses each year. In the classroom, Belanger uses original tools and materials to provide students with hands-on experience and to emphasize the relationship between the physical and intellectual structure of the book. He assiduously collects items related to bookmaking, from the remains of incunabula (the first printed books of the fifteenth century) and their handwritten precursors to books demonstrating the range of bindings and structures, to samples of materials from which books have been constructed. With thousands of former students currently at work in the field and offshoots of his programs in California, France, Australia, and New Zealand, Belanger is making the world a more secure place for the irreplaceable legacy of the book.

Edet Belzberg, Documentary Filmmaker. New York, New York
Edet Belzberg is a documentary filmmaker whose films are distinguished by her choice of subjects, in-depth treatment of time and place, and elegant storytelling. In Belzberg’s signature film, Children Underground, she follows and films a group of homeless children living in a train station in Bucharest, Romania. Raw, graceful, and insightful, Children Underground personalizes the often dangerous and always chaotic and uncertain world of youngsters casually abandoned by their families and the larger society. Overcoming the obstacles of language, culture, and place, she records the individual and collective daily struggles of the five main characters with an unflinching, compassionate eye, managing at the same time to win the trust of children whose capacity for trust is all but depleted. Critically acclaimed throughout the U.S. and Europe, the film has focused international attention on the social and institutional disregard of child welfare in post-communist Romania. Belzberg’s characteristically intense and detailed treatment of the lives of children again defines her most recent and just completed film, Gymnast. While the film focuses on a completely different group of children in a totally different setting (the top three American girls preparing for the 2000 Olympics), Gymnast is a bold and original treatment of children under extreme conditions as it explores the motivations of individual stakeholders in the Olympic success of these teenagers. Future projects of this young filmmaker promise other enduring revelations into the lives of overlooked subjects and the realities of under-explored conditions.

Majora Carter, Urban Revitalization Strategist. Founder and Executive Director, Sustainable South Bronx, Bronx, New York
Majora Carter, of the South Bronx, is determined to make her community more livable, greener, and healthier than it is today. The founder and director of Sustainable South Bronx (SSB), Carter is a relentless and charismatic urban strategist who seeks to address the disproportionate environmental and public health burdens experienced by residents of the South Bronx. Working in partnership with local government, businesses, and neighborhood organizations, she creates new opportunities for transportation, fitness and recreation, nutrition, and economic development. Returning to her native Hunts Point section of the South Bronx after completing an MFA, Carter first sought to deepen the emphasis on the arts in the South Bronx. It wasn’t long, however, before she was engaged in battle over New York City’s plan for a solid waste management plant to process 40 percent of the city’s garbage at a facility on the Hunts Point waterfront. Successfully diverting this plan, SSB and other groups envisioned a new relationship with the Bronx River and embarked on projects that built a park on the site of a former concrete plant, enabled public waterfront access where the shore was once littered with industrial scrap, developed an ecological restoration workforce to protect and maintain the natural environment, and raised funds to conduct a feasibility study for the establishment of a bike/pedestrian greenway along the waterfront. Making the connection between green space and health, Carter added a community education focus to the work of the SSB around fitness, food choices, and air quality. As part of this effort, she established a community market and introduced green roof technology. Today, Majora Carter is profoundly transforming the quality of life for South Bronx residents.

Lu Chen, Neuroscientist, Assistant Professor of Neurobiology. University of California/Berkeley, Berkeley, California
Lu Chen is a neuroscientist who is probing the mys-teries of the synapse, the anatomical structure that mediates chemical signals sent from one neuron to another. Specifically, she explores the mechanisms underlying the function of synapses that use the neurotransmitter glutamate (the most common excitatory neurotransmitter in the central nervous system). This transmitter interacts with postsynaptic neurons with several different types of receptors: kainate, NMDA, and AMPA. Studies of a genetically mutated mouse strain showed that AMPA receptor function is disrupted by the lack of stargazin, a protein homologous with a subunit of the calcium channel. Through a combination of molecular genetic, cell biology, biochemical, and electrophysiologic approaches, Chen and her colleagues were able to demonstrate that stargazin plays a key role in the structural integrity of the AMPA receptor complex. Chen created a line of non-neuronal cells that express each of the AMPA receptor components; in co-culture with hippocampal neurons, she showed that the neurons induced the formation of functional AMPA receptors in the non-neuronal cell line, and that stargazin represents an essential element of the receptor assembly. This observation opens a new avenue for exploring the role of accessory proteins in synaptic formation and plasticity. The potential impact is tremendous not just for understanding the basic biology of learning and memory, but also in the development of new kinds of treatments for neurological and psychiatric diseases.

Michael Cohen, Pharmacist. President, Institute for Safe Medication Practices, Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania
Michael Cohen is a pharmacist with a passion for patient safety and a commitment to reducing preventable drug and drug delivery mistakes that kill thousands of people each year in the United States. An early pioneer in an international movement to address medication error, Cohen is founder and president of the Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP), a nonprofit clearinghouse for the distribution of impartial medical safety information to the health care community. As the number of available drugs and prescriptions filled each year continues to soar, many with look-alike or sound-alike names, Cohen is a recognized leader in promoting increased consumer vigilance, drug industry accountability, and practitioner responsibility. Through ISMP he has championed improvements in drug naming, labeling, packaging, delivery systems, and regulation. At the cornerstone of his efforts, Cohen co-founded the continuous, voluntary, and confidential Medication Error Reporting Program (now administered by U.S. Pharmacopoeia), for medical professionals to learn about and understand the causes of errors across the nation. Where once errors were undisclosed and viewed as embarrassing to the health care industry, the active collection of these reports has helped generate practical and early responses to combat potentially widespread and dangerous outcomes. For more than three decades, Cohen has played key roles in bringing about numerous corrections in error-prone products and practices. Today, he continues to be a major force in giving national visibility to the ubiquitous and serious problem of medication errors.

Joseph Curtin, Violinmaker. Principal, Joseph Curtin Studios, Ann Arbor, Michigan
Joseph Curtin is a master violinmaker who crafts original, world-class violins for the twenty-first century. A luthier with research interests in nontraditional materials, nontraditional structures, and violin acoustics, Curtin weds acoustic science to the art of violinmaking and merges time-honored techniques with new materials and design. Having first excelled in the traditional practice of creating replicas of the great Italian instruments of Stradivari and Guarneri, Curtin is now confronting the dilemma of the evolution of the violin, creating entirely new instruments that incorporate contemporary materials and aesthetics. In so doing, he has collaborated with leading acoustics researchers in the field, experimenting with violin acoustics, playability, sound, and ergonomics. His approach consists of an artful synthesis of the old and new and offers clear evidence that the centuries-old art of violinmaking is still evolving. Using new methods of construction and affordable modern composite materials to improve the instrument’s response and sound, he produces violins and violas of remarkable tone, power, projection, and timbre. Driven by a desire to experiment and innovate, Curtin builds distinctive violins of enduring quality that are increasingly recognized worldwide as instruments of the highest order.

Aaron Dworkin, Music Educator. Founder and President, The Sphinx Organization, Detroit, Michigan
Aaron Dworkin is a talented violinist, charismatic arts educator, and the founder and president of the Detroit-based Sphinx Organization. He and his organization have expanded access for increased numbers of minorities to careers in classical music around the country. Through his efforts, he has transformed the lives of many African-American and Latino musicians and changed the landscape of classical music in America. As minorities currently comprise only 1.5 percent of professional symphony players in the United States, Sphinx set a course to attract young men and women to classical music, countering their perception that such careers face insurmountable barriers and providing them with rigorous training, affordable instruments, and performance opportunities. The results have been to turn out fresh new talent second to none and to fill a void recognized by all. Determined to reverse the isolation of whole populations of young musicians from the beauty, value, and meaning of classical music, Dworkin began by organizing an annual national competition for minority string players. His programs grew rapidly to encompass an orchestra entirely composed of African-American and Latino musicians; a summer training program for underprivileged string players; music education outreach programs in Detroit public schools; an instrument fund for players unable to afford them; and a scholarship fund for deserving musicians who otherwise could not go on for advanced training. Through his programs and nurturing support, Dworkin assures access and enriches symphonies across the country.

Teresita Fernández, Sculptor. New York, New York
Teresita Fernández is a sculptor who integrates architecture and the optical effects of color and light to produce exquisitely constructed, contemplative spaces. In her sculptural environments, Fernández alters space to create illusions, subtly modifying the physical sensations of the viewer and dramatizing the role architecture plays in shaping our lives and perceptions. Her room-sized installations evoke quietude and mystery, reflecting such diverse aesthetic influences as Roman and Ottoman architecture and Japanese gardens. In other works, she creates large-scale, referential constructions, such as a pool, a waterfall, and a sand dune stripped of specific context. With these pared-down pieces, she invites viewers to draw from their personal memories and observations. Employing common building materials to startling effect — tiny plastic cubes form a shimmering rainbow and acrylic rods suggest the flexible strength of bamboo — she inspires viewers to see a new relationship between built environments and the natural world. With lyrical and immaculately executed indoor and outdoor works, Fernández is pushing the boundaries of sculpture and installation art into the fields of architecture and landscape architecture.

Claire Gmachl, Laser Engineer. Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey
Claire Gmachl is an experimental scientist working at the intersection of technology and fundamental physics in the fields of optics and semiconductor laser technology. A wizard at imagining and creating new designs for solid-state lasers, Gmachl’s pioneering work has led to critical advances in the development of Quantum Cascade (QC) lasers. QC lasers are a rapidly evolving class of high-performing, mid-infrared, semiconductor light sources. The lasers designed by Gmachl and her colleagues are noteworthy for their considerable wavelength tunability, high-power operation, high-speed modulation capabilities, and seemingly unlimited design potential. She has demonstrated the versatility and promise of mid-infrared light sources for a wide range of applications, including trace gas sensing in the environmental, industrial, and medical fields, and free-space optics in wireless communications. Her recent achievements include the development of QC microlasers and new hybrid devices, which include quantum cascade structures and nonlinear components, dramatically extending the wavelength range of QC technology. These designs have direct applications to environmental monitoring, clinical diagnoses, spectroscopy, and chemical process control. With her combination of technological flair and deep understanding of physical concepts, Claire Gmachl translates complex principles into original and practical devices that advance our understanding of optical device designs and promise to address a wide variety of engineering challenges.

Sue Goldie, Physician/Researcher. Associate Professor of Health Decision Science, Harvard University/School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts
Sue Goldie is a physician and public health researcher whose leadership, rigorous analyses, and creative interventions are transforming women’s health care around the world. Incorporating mathematical modeling, the science of medical decision-making, and risk analysis, she has successfully identified important new strategies to improve women’s health in underserved populations. Together with her collaborators, Goldie has developed complex and comprehensive epidemiological models for diseases such as HIV, gonorrhea, chlamydia, herpes, and hepatitis C. By weighing disease characteristics and quantitatively assessing possible health interventions for potential populations, Goldie has translated her models into actionable information to guide global health interventions and policies. A focus of Goldie’s research is the human papilloma virus (HPV) and its link to cervical cancer, the most common cause of cancer death in women worldwide. Combining clinical, scientific, and mathematical methodology, Goldie has demonstrated that non-physicians can be trained to conduct direct visual inspections or HPV testing to detect early cervical cancer, a more practical and cost-effective approach than the expensive and technically challenging Pap smear screening method. She has taken her findings to the field, creating practical, sustainable cervical cancer-screening programs in Haiti, India, Kenya, Peru, South Africa, and Thailand. Indeed, by bridging the gap between clinical researchers and global policymakers, Goldie has already enhanced the lives of tens of thousands of women and has the potential to do so on a broader scale still.

Steven Goodman, Conservation Biologist. Field Biologist, Department of Zoology, The Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, Illinois and Antananarivo, Madagascar
Steven Goodman is a conservation biologist who studies and documents the endangered, diverse, and previously unknown plants and animals of Madagascar. In terms of biodiversity and conservation, no single country in the world is more dynamic, more diverse, and more understudied than Madagascar. A researcher at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, Goodman spends most of his time in Madagascar where he works with international conservation groups and local biologists to record and preserve ecosystems increasingly threatened by rapid deforestation and population growth. He also founded and leads the Ecological Training Program that mentors, trains, and prepares local Malagasy biologists in pressing conservation issues, a model that is being replicated elsewhere in ecologically threatened regions in Africa and around the world. A tenacious researcher, Goodman has braved extreme conditions to identify dozens of new bird, insect, and mammal species, to conduct rigorous biological surveys and inventories, and to transform the scientific knowledge of the region. He is the co--editor and lead author of The Natural History of Madagascar, the definitive book on the island’s geology, soils, climate, forest and human ecology, plants, invertebrates, fishes, reptiles, birds, and mammals. With inexhaustible energy, Goodman has brought Madagascar to the forefront of international conservation, demonstrating the urgent need for preservation and the power of mentoring future custodians of the world’s biological richness.

Pehr Harbury, Biochemist. Associate Professor of Biochemistry, Stanford University, Stanford, California
Pehr Harbury is a biochemist who explores the structure, activity, and synthesis of proteins with the aim of developing more potent and more specific drugs for the treatment of disease. Early in his career, he focused on rational protein design, based on first-principles of amino acid structural chemistry. Most functional proteins consist of amino acid side chains attached to a protein backbone. Harbury developed a method for accurately predicting main- and side-chain structures, even for complex multimers. To demonstrate the power of his calculation, he and his colleagues synthesized proteins with unnatural, right-handed supercoiled structure and showed that they were able accurately to predict structures that had never previously existed. To improve understanding of side-chain functionality, Harbury developed an assay for testing the interaction of substrate and specific amino acids. Most recently, Harbury has introduced an efficient and effective method for using in vitro evolution to control combinatorial synthesis of small molecules. With this technique, he is able to tether to a single molecule the information needed to synthesize more of it. When combined with an instruction set many orders of magnitude larger than previous combinatorial chemical libraries and a large pool of chemical manipulations compatible with the process, Harbury’s “DNA Display” technique promises vast increases in the speed, efficiency, and search space for the use of combinatorial chemistry in the development of new drugs.

Nicole King, Molecular Biologist. Assistant Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California
Nicole King is a biologist who is reconstructing a critical event in the evolution of life — the emergence of multicellular organisms that form the base of the animal (metazoan) kingdom. Although the unicellular progenitors of animals are long gone, King has focused on organisms known as choanoflagellates, a putative outgroup in the early history of metazoan development. Choanoflagellates are unicellular organisms that share some morphological features with animal cells; some species also form colonies. Using molecular genetic techniques, King isolated from choanoflagellates two types of genes: adhesion molecules and receptor tyrosine kinases. These genes are critical for maintaining the physical integrity of tissues and for intercellular communication, respectively; they were previously believed to exist only in animals. Furthermore, she demonstrated that pharmacological inhibition of receptor tyrosine kinase activity reduces the rate of cell division in choanoflagellates, indicating a functional homology of these genes with their orthologs in animals. With these results, King has shown that the genes necessary for multicellular organization predate the emergence of the metazoan kingdom. She argues that demonstrating the existence of genes does not, however, imply that they are working in a coordinated fashion. In her future research, King plans to use whole organism sequence data to compare the functional genomic organization of choanoflagellates with early metazoans such as the sponge family.

Jon Kleinberg, Computer Scientist. Professor of Computer Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
Jon Kleinberg is a computer scientist with a reputation for tackling important, practical problems and, in the process, deriving deep mathematical insights. His research spans diverse topics ranging from computer networking analysis and routing, to data mining, to comparative genomics and protein structure. He is best known for his contributions to two aspects of network theory: “small worlds” and searching the World Wide Web. Since the original demonstration by Milgram, it has become widely understood that any two people are linked by a relatively small number of connections among mutual acquaintances (“six degrees of separation”). Kleinberg extended this concept by introducing the notion of navigability — essentially, the information structure of the network necessary for individuals efficiently to make distant connections based solely on local information. Surprisingly, he was able to prove that, while certain architectures can be computationally efficient, no algorithm can find the shortest path in networks with short, random connections. This demonstration has important implications both in sociology and in distributed network architecture design (e.g., peer-to-peer file sharing). In addition, Kleinberg has developed an algorithm for identifying the structure of website interactions; his algorithm distinguishes “authority” sites, which contain definitive information, from “hub” sites, which refer to authority sites using hyperlinks. Beyond immediate application in the development of web search engines, this algorithm makes it possible to identify communities of interest on the web without explicit effort needed by members (even without awareness of the existence of the community).

Jonathan Lethem, Novelist. Brooklyn, New York
Jonathan Lethem is the author of six novels, a novella, two short story collections, and a volume of essays that explore, in various ways, the relationship between so-called high art and popular culture. Characterized by narrative leaps between vastly divergent genres, his fiction weaves the conventions of noir mysteries, westerns, science fiction, and comic books into coming-of-age tales that are otherwise evocative and realistic in content. In his most recent novel, Fortress of Solitude (2003), he depicts the intricate codes of childhood street life he navigated while growing up in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn during the 1970s, a time when the neighborhood was gentrifying and rife with race and class tensions. Demonstrating keen powers of observation and description, he embeds his readers deeply within the physical and social worlds his characters inhabit, in the schoolyards, on the stoops, and in the midst of the energetic dialogue and pop riffs that pulse throughout. While comic book motifs appear in Fortress, Lethem’s earlier novel, Motherless Brooklyn (1999), takes the form of a detective story that is ceaselessly interrupted by the outbursts of its highly unconventional narrator, a Tourettes-plagued private investigator named Lionel Essrog. By orchestrating such allusions to popular genres within his fiction, Lethem heightens emotional engagement with his characters, blurs boundaries across a broad spectrum of cultural creations, and expands the frontier of American fiction.

Michael Manga, Geophysicist. Associate Professor of Earth  and Planetary Science, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California
Michael Manga is a geophysicist who applies his background in fluid dynamics to a wide variety of fundamental questions in geology. The phenomena he explores range in scale from microscopic to planetary; he draws insights from field measurements, numerical simulations, laboratory experiments, and even astronomical observations. Manga began his research career by investigating the fluid dynamics of magma. He showed that the effects of bubbles or gas pockets in a liquid can alter shearing rates as a function of fluid viscosity, surface tension between liquid and gas, bubble size, and number of bubbles. He and colleagues subsequently showed how crystal and bubble orientations preserved in volcanic rocks reflect the straining forces imposed on subterranean magma. More recently, Manga has used surface water flux to explore the redistribution of stress through the Earth’s crust following an earthquake. Somewhat surprisingly, tiny deformation in water-saturated rock due to distant earthquakes can trigger local earthquakes, changes in groundwater flow, or shifts in underground magma. These results offer the possibility of better identification of regional seismic hazards and forecasting of seismic activity. He does not limit his investigations strictly to terrestrial matters, however; other studies consider the fluid dynamics of planetary evolution, exploring volcanism on Mars and tidal pressures on the ice sheet of Jupiter’s moon, Europa. In the laboratory, he uses tanks of corn syrup to model the geophysical properties of these astronomical bodies. Through his coordinated fieldwork, experimentation, and simulation, Manga has opened new avenues for understanding a wide and ever-growing range of geological phenomena.

Todd Martinez, Theoretical Chemist. Professor of Chemistry, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois
Todd Martinez is a theoretical chemist who seeks to explain and predict complex chemical reactions based on the quantum mechanical properties of the atoms involved in the reaction. His work focuses on describing molecules at excited states, where conventional ground state electronic structure calculations are inadequate to capture the nature of their chemical reactivity. At subatomic scales, the electrons and nuclei do not behave like billiard balls, but rather are intrinsically statistical; when graphed, the probabilities representing possible states of a molecule can appear as familiar shapes. In a class of chemical reactions referred to as “nonadiabatic,” graphs of potential energy surfaces form cones and these cones intersect. Martinez develops strategies and algorithms that predict the dynamic evolution of systems having conical intersections. He has created models for photoisomerization in several biochemically important molecules. Photoisomerization is a nonadiabatic process in which a photon triggers a molecule to change its conformation (but not its constituent atoms); among other things, it represents the biophysical basis for vision. By combining effective strategies for computing the quantum mechanical properties of complex molecules with a deep intuition for their underlying chemical behavior, Martinez is revealing fundamental insights into the physical basis for chemical reactions.

Julie Mehretu, Painter. New York, New York
Julie Mehretu is an artist who transforms her canvases into visually spectacular excavations of multiple epochs and locales. As a foundation and point of departure for her work, she depicts public spaces from around the globe — museums, stadiums, and international airports — in the form of heroically scaled maps and architectural plans. On surfaces encased in coats of transparent resin, she paints over these sprawling drawings a maelstrom of colorful, geometric abstractions, iconic imagery, and loosely figurative markings that evoke a world of asso-ciations. Certain sketch marks suggest explosions, while others call to mind the curved backs of pilgrims praying at Mecca, or landscapes flecked with grassy plains. In one work entitled Transcending: The New International (2003), she renders in India ink the buildings and urban plans from all the capital cities of Africa onto one stratified topography; she includes designs from various eras and overlays these diagrams with a tumult of lines tracing the migrations and battlefronts that have crisscrossed this vast terrain. By layering multiple pictorial planes, she creates the illusion of movement, of elements advancing and receding at dizzying speeds within graphically stunning, timeless space. In so doing, Mehretu creates abstract paintings that grant viewers a dazzling glimpse of history’s vicissitudes.

Kevin M. Murphy, Economist. George J. Stigler Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago, Graduate School of Business, Chicago, Illinois
Kevin M. Murphy is a wide-ranging economist with an aptitude for applying careful empirical analyses within rigorous theoretical frameworks to economic questions of immense social import. Early in his career, Murphy identified how trends in wage inequality reflect underlying changes in demand for labor. These studies not only considered such variables as work experience, education, race, and gender, but also highlighted the importance of within-group wage variability in understanding labor economics. Murphy also considered the phenomenon of addiction from an economic perspective. Contrary to widely held beliefs that addiction distorts economic judgment, Murphy and colleagues developed a model of “rational addiction,” in which consumers anticipate the expected future consequences of their current actions; he developed empirical analyses supporting this model from data on cigarette consumption. Using his model in conjunction with a structural analysis of the industry, Murphy explained the counterintuitive observation of increasing profits for cigarette manufacturers despite decreasing demand for their products. More recently, he has shown that, particularly for conditions such as heart disease and cancer, investment in basic health research and care results in orders of magnitude returns in economic value. In these areas, and many others, Murphy challenges preconceived notions and attacks seemingly intractable economic questions, placing them on a sound empirical and theoretical footing.

Olufunmilayo Olopade, Clinician/Researcher. Professor of Medicine and Human Genetics, University of Chicago Hospitals, Chicago, Illinois
Olufunmilayo Olopade is an oncologist who translates her basic research on individual and population cancer susceptibility into an effective clinical practice for treating breast cancer among African and African-American women. Trained in clinical oncology and cancer genetics, her early research led to the identification of a tumor suppressor locus on the short arm of the 9th chromosome. Her more recent work focuses more specifically on the molecular genetics of breast cancer in women of African heritage. Tumors of this population demonstrate distinct biological characteristics, including a high level of aggressiveness and resistance to treatment. Olopade first described recurrent BRCA1 mutations in extended African-American families with breast cancer, and reported BRCA 1 and BRCA 2 mutations in pre--menopausal breast cancer patients from West Africa. As founding director of the Center for Clinical Cancer Genetics at the University of Chicago, Olopade leads the application of her research from the bench to the bedside. She oversees a coordinated, multidisciplinary, clinical program that includes oncologists, primary care physicians, genetic counselors, sociologists, and psychologists and provides free access to genetic services for local, at-risk populations. Currently, Olopade also heads a West African clinical trial for a pill form of chemotherapy as treatment for women with advanced breast cancer. In bridging continents with her innovative research and service models, Olopade is increasing the probability of improved outcomes for millions of women of African heritage at risk for cancer here and abroad.

Fazal Sheikh, Photographer. Zurich, Switzerland
Fazal Sheikh is a documentary photographer who uses the personalizing power of portraiture to bring the faces of the world’s displaced people into focus. His subjects have included Sudanese and Somali refugees at camps in Kenya, survivors of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the indigenous people of Pantanal, Brazil, and immigrants crossing, then recrossing, the border between Mexico and the United States. In contrast to sensational, mass-media depictions of humanitarian crises, he takes formal portraits of his subjects — living among them and earning their collaboration. With names printed prominently next to their images, mothers, children, wounded soldiers, and tribal elders assume stately poses, hold pictures of loved ones, and gaze directly at Sheikh’s camera, producing understated studies of human dignity under devastating circumstances. Relying on the clarity of black-and-white, naturally lit images, he presents these striking photographs with accompanying texts that describe, in the words of his subjects, the personal histories and circumstances leading to the conditions he records. In addition to completing five books of photography and participating in numerous exhibitions, Sheikh disseminates his work on DVD and via free website to reach the widest international audience possible. With his solemn and arresting works of art, Sheikh slows the act of viewing, calls attention to the persistent nature of conflict, and highlights the importance of bearing witness.

Emily Thompson, Aural Historian. Associate Professor of History, University of California, San Diego, San Diego, California
Emily Thompson is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work focuses on the often-overlooked subject of sound and fills an important gap in contemporary American history, reaching into domains as diverse as urban design and cinema studies. In her book, The Soundscape of Modernity, she integrates the histories of the United States, technology, science, sound production, and acoustics to examine the transformation of the American soundscape from the turn of the century to the opening of Radio City Music Hall in 1933. Thompson organizes her work around developments in twentieth-century architecture, such as new concert halls and new building materials, and explores innovations in the science of acoustics, the emergence of excessive noise, and the efforts of scientists and designers to create new spaces and a new, “modern” sound. Her interests center around changes in acoustic design as reflections of larger cultural and social shifts in American life in the early 1900s; she documents the interplay between differences in acoustic characteristics of buildings constructed during this period and increases in the value placed at the time on technological mastery, efficiency, and control in modern life. Thompson’s most recent project, on the role of engineers, projectionists, and other industry technicians in the transition to synchronized sound in cinema, promises to provide a similarly penetrating analysis of another important moment in the history of sound and technology. By charting the transformation of the elusive and ephemeral phenomenon of sound, Thompson has recovered an important history of our time.

Michael Walsh, Vehicle Emissions Specialist. Technical Consultant, Arlington, Virginia
Michael Walsh is an independent engineer and policy analyst committed to improving regional public health and the global environment by reducing the impact of internal combustion engines on air quality. Beginning in the 1980s with his work shaping legislation that significantly reduced lead emissions in the United States, Walsh has developed a reputation for finding effective and practical solutions to thorny public policy problems. His bimonthly publication, Car Lines, is widely recognized by governments, manufacturers, and research institutions as a vital resource for information regarding technical advances in emissions control and trends in regulatory policies. Because of his encyclopedic knowledge of international standards, engineering policy, and air pollutant chemistry, government agencies throughout the world turn to him to help tailor policies to protect air quality that accommodate local priorities and economic conditions. In Central America and Asia, Walsh has demonstrated how leapfrogging emissions standards of the most industrialized economies positions other economies to become centers of advanced technology. Recently, he has turned his attention to reducing sulfur emissions from diesel engines, helping to design fuel standards in the U.S. and elsewhere. With projections of over 1 billion vehicles on the roads worldwide by the year 2025, the problem of protecting health and air quality looms large. By virtue of his indefatigable commitment, soft-spoken persuasion, and unrivaled expertise, Walsh continues to play an important and strategic role in translating science into effective policy action.