Faculty
Prof. John A. Rassias of the Romance Languages Department, an authority on intensive language training who has been a Peace Corps consultant on several continents, last summer extended his way to Micronesia. He conducted a three-week workshop in the methodology of the Peace Corps intensive training program on Saipan, the tiny Mariana Island that is the capital of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands.
Following this course his students fanned out over the vastness of Micronesia to teach 12 different languages, using the teaching methods in which they had been drilled. In addition, some will teach English as a second language and some will teach mathematics, using these methods.
Those assembled for Professor Rassias' workshop included 43 language instructors, seven language coordinators, and 170 -language trainees. The trainees were Peace Corps volunteers whose average age was about 24. The instructors and coordinators were Micronesian natives.
The workshop programs went from early morning to late at night. In addition to the instructors and trainees, about 200 native children participated, serving as classroom subjects.
On his return Professor Rassias reported, with characteristic enthusiasm, "The weather and the scenery were magnificent when we had time to enjoy them. However, it was sobering to look out from a nice beach across that blue ocean to a tank in the shallows of a reef with its rusting guns pointed shoreward. It was one of the tanks that didn't make it to shore during the 1944 invasion in World War II."
Mrs. Jeanne M. Prosser, Lecturer in History, has received a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies for her study of "Bordeaux: Its Economic and Social Classes on the Eve of the French Revolution."... Ray Nash, Emeritus Professor of Art, is the author, in part, of the article on calligraphy in the 1970 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica.... Dr. Lester B. Salans, Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Medical School, has been awarded a $57,950 National Institutes of Health grant for a study of weight reduction by dietary means.... Mario di Bonaventura, the Arthur R. Virgin Professor of Music and Director of Music at the Hopkins Center, lectured on "The Orchestra in 2001" at the Canadian Music Council Conference in Ottawa. . . . Prof. Colin D. Campbell of the Economics Department was a member of the Presidential Task Force on the Aging whose report, "Toward a Brighter Future for the Elderly," was published last spring.
Four grants totaling $74,600 have been made to three departments at the College by the National Science Foundation.
A grant of $32,000 was made to the Mathematics Department for research in "Topology of Knots and H-Spaces" to be conducted by Profs. Richard H. Crowell, Edward M. Brown, and Martin Arkowitz. Topology is a branch of modern mathematics that underlies all geometry and much of other mathematics. Knots and H-Spaces are specific fields of study within topology.
A second grant to the Mathematics Department, amounting to $6,700, helped underwrite a week-long regional conference on Unitary Group Representation held on campus during the summer. It was one of nine NSF-backed conferences designed to strengthen certain areas of mathematical study. Group Representation is a mathematical specialty with strong connections with many areas of modern mathematical interest, as well as of interest to physicists studying quantum mechanics. The conference, directed by Kenneth I. Gross, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, brought 25 young mathematicians to campus.
A grant of $29,100 was awarded the Chemistry Department for the purchase of parts for a multinuciear (nuclear magnetic resonance) spectrometer. Prof. Thomas R. Spencer Jr., department chairman, said Profs. Paul R. Shafer and Karl F. Kuhlmann will purchase parts and construct machinery to make additions to the "very good facilities" already at the College for spectrometric research. The improved equipment will enable researchers to look directly at carbon atoms, particularly Isotope 13 of carbon.
Another NSF grant of $6,800 was made to the Department of Biological Sciences for research on "Organic Production in Lakes," to be undertaken by Prof. John J. Gilbert, in conjunction with colleagues here and in India. They will study the rates of algae zooplankton and fish in the high-altitude, freshwater lakes of Kashmir.
Dean John W. Hennessey Jr. of the Tuck School has been elected a member of the Board of Directors of the American Association of Collegiate Schools of Business. He was one of three new members of the Association's nine-man board elected at its annual meeting last spring in San Francisco.
The Tuck School, oldest graduate school of business administration in the nation, is one of nearly 150 schools in the United States and Canada that are accredited members of the Association.
Several members of the Physics Department presented a paper entitled "Non-Linear Perturbations and Electron Scattering in a Beam Plasma System" at the Symposium on Feedback and Dynamic Control of Plasmas at Princeton last summer. They were Prof. John Walsh, Prof. D. Bancroft of Colby College who was a visiting member of the department last year, and Research Associate Robert Layman. Peter Lewis '70 also was a coauthor of the paper.
Profs. Thomas A. Spencer and Gordon W. Gribble of the Chemistry Department presented papers at the 7th International Symposium on the Chemistry of Natural Products in Riga, Latvia, USSR, last summer. Professor Spencer reported his research on the mechanism of demethylation in cholesterol biosynthesis while Professor Gribble discussed his synthesis of a plant alkaloid, elaeocarpidine.
