Faculty

As the new president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Leonard M. Rieser '44, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and a Vice President of the College, will have a major role in the important international meeting of scientists from throughout the Americas and overseas to be held in Mexico City, June 30 to July 4.

The meeting, sponsored jointly by the AAAS and the Mexican National Council for Science and Technology, is expected to attract more than 5000 scientists to consider a host of scientific questions under the general theme "Science and Man in the Americas." As a mark of its significance to Latin America, the conference will be opened by Mexico's President Luis Echeverria Alvarez as honorary chairman.

While there, Dean Rieser will also participate in meetings of both the Board of Directors and the Council of the AAAS. On July 5 he will fly to Brazil to represent the AAAS and speak at opening ceremonies of the annual meeting of the Brazilian Association for Progress in Science.

It is noteworthy that the international meeting in Mexico City will have a strong coloration of Green in the area of the Earth Sciences, reflecting the international recognition which that department at Dartmouth has earned.

Charles L. Drake, Professor of Earth Sciences, an authority on oceanography, marine geology and tectonics and president of the International Union Commission on Geodynamics, is the American coarranger of the conference's technical symposium on geodynamics.

Similarly, Geophysics Professor Robert W. Decker, an authority on earth movements and volcanoes, is the U.S. architect of the symposium on volcanism in Mexico and Central America. Also speaking at that symposium will be Richard E. Stoiber '32, chairman of the Earth Sciences Department at Dartmouth and the Frederick Hall Professor of Mineralogy (see Endowed Professorship column); Samuel Bonis, a Dartmouth research associate in geology in Guatemala; Michael J. Carr '69, of Cape Elizabeth, Me., a doctoral candidate in geology at Dartmouth, and William I. Rose '66, now a member of the faculty at Michigan Technical University.

Also attending the conference from Dartmouth will be Chemistry Professor James F. Hornig, Associate Dean of the Faculty for the sciences and director of graduate studies.

Along with three trips for customary spring visits to alumni clubs, this time only as far west as Chicago, President Kemeny has had a busy schedule speaking to professional and educational groups, while also squeezing in some international travel for Dartmouth.

He gave the principal address at the June 4 Commencement of Boston College, which also honored him with an honorary degree. Earlier, in April, he was the keynote speaker at the spring conference of the Interuniversity Communications Council, known as EDUCOM, a consortium of 118 universities and colleges cooperating to advance computer technology and communication in higher education. And while in Washington, D.C., to attend a meeting of the National Commission on Libraries and Information Sciences, of which he is a member, he also was principal speaker at a regional meeting of librarians and information service specialists sponsored by the District of Columbia Library Association.

Finally, spotlighting Dartmouth's several educational sites in Europe under its two overseas programs - the Foreign Study Program and the Language Study Abroad program - President Kemeny flew with his wife to France in mid-May to visit students studying French at Bourges and Blois. John A. Rassias, Professor of Romance Languages and Literature and director of the Foreign Language Program, was their host as he had been to Greater Boston alumni who had made the trip earlier. President Kemeny also spoke to the Dartmouth Club of Paris.

The Kemenys ended their European trip in England, where he spoke to a combined meeting of the Dartmouth Club of London and more than 100 members of the Dartmouth Alumni Association of Greater Boston who flew to London on a vacation charter flight for the occasion. While there, Mr. and Mrs. Kemeny also lunched with Lord and Lady Dartmouth at their home.

Two assistant Professors from the Physics Department have been awarded separate contract grants by the Atomic Energy Commission for the support of research of interest to AEC. At a time when research grants are increasingly difficult to get, particularly for younger scientists, the award of grants by a single agency to two men in such a relatively small department is a singular recognition for the work of each.

Walter E. Lawrence III, a 1964 Phi Beta Kappa graduate from Carnegie-Mellon University with a doctorate from Cornell, has been awarded a grant of $15,318 for research on "Theory of Electron-Photon Scattering Effects in Metals." He joined the faculty in 1971.

And a grant of $22,903 has been awarded P. Bruce Pipes, a specialist in low temperature physics, in support of a project entitled "Experimental Determination of the Temperature Dependence of Metallic Work Functions at Low Temperatures." Professor Pipes, who was graduated summa cum laude from Rice University in 1963 and holds a Ph.D. in low temperature physics from Stanford, began teaching at Dartmouth as a visiting assistant professor in 1971 and joined the faculty a year later.

In the Biology Department, Associate Professor John J. Gilbert, an authority on the minute, usually microscopic multi-cell aquatic animals called rotifers, has been awarded one of the highly coveted Career Development Awards by the Public Health Service. A limited number of these grants, which provide full salary support for five years, is awarded to encourage the research work of highly promising scientists in the public health field.

Professor Gilbert, a graduate of Williams College with a Ph.D. from Yale, joined the Dartmouth faculty in 1966 after teaching for two years at Princeton. He has been intensively studying varieties of rotifers since 1963 and since then has already received three National Science Foundation support grants.

For his work advancing knowledge of the physical chemistry of the sugarlike connective tissue called polysaccharides, Chemistry Professor Robert L. Cleland has been awarded a $49,984 research grant for a two-year period by the National Science Foundation. A graduate of Texas A. & M. College in 1948 with a Ph.D. from M.I.T., Professor Cleland has been a member of the Dartmouth faculty since 1960.

Also in the Chemistry Department, Professors Charles Braun and James Hornig have received a grant of $49,200 from the National Science Foundation renewing support for their work on "Energy Transfer in Molecular Solids." In recognition of his work, the NSF also made it possible for Professor Braun to attend the sixth annual Molecular Crystal Symposium held last month at Schloss Elmau, Bavaria, West Germany. The symposium, conducted every other year for a special interest group, is limited to 100 specialists in the field. He also has been invited to be one of 35 scientists participating next August in a special meeting in Japan as part of the U.S.-Japan Scientific Cooperative Program sponsored by the NSF.

From the Mathematics Department comes word of a one-year grant renewal, amounting to $27,900, to Professor Richard H. Crowell, vice-chairman of the department, from the NSF for his work on "Topology of Knots and H-Spaces." Assistant Mathematics Professor James E. Baumgartner has also received an NSF grant of $5300 to support for one year his development of a "Combinatorial set Theory." A workshop on the Mathematics of Cooperative Phenomena will be conducted this summer by Mathematics Professors J. Laurie Snell, chairman of the department, and Reese T. Prosser, who have received an NSF support grant for that purpose.

Through the collaboration of three members of the faculty with different backgrounds, a handful of Dartmouth undergraduates discovered for a term this year the distinctive charms of Rumania that have been for the most part obscured for the generation since World War II by a combination of ideological curtain and geography.

Helping the students break the cultural trail between Dartmouth and the University of Bucharest, in what is planned to be an exchange between the two institutions, were Government Professor Charles B. McLane '41, an authority on Russia and the Far East; Robert D. Master, Associate Professor of Government and former cultural attache at the American embassy in Paris; and lon T. Agheana, Assistant Professor of Romance Languages and Literature and a native of Ploesti, Rumania.

From their contacts in the U.S. State Department, under whose auspices the term was arranged as part of the Dartmouth Foreign Study Program, and Eastern European governments, Professors McLane and Masters set up the Rumanian program of study, and Professor McLane spent a week in Bucharest after the term ended to assess the initial operation and to plan next year's schedule. Meanwhile, Professor Agheana drew on his cultural heritage to conduct in advance an intensive non-credit, seminar course to prepare students in the language and customs of that "far-away land," a Romance language enclave surrounded by Slavs, Hungarians, and Bulgarians.

To Kathleen Moriarty, Assistant Professor of Speech, the state of civilization rests importantly on the ability to communicate, and when she isn't teaching some of the overflow classes in the Speech Department, she is out putting her theories to the hardest possible tests.

During the past winter, once a week she traveled south to the Vermont State Prison in Windsor to help a dozen interested inmates with problems of practical communication. In that context, practical communication ranged from preparing the men to face the parole board or to handle job interviews after their release to assistance in creative writing. For some, the volunteer course merely meant a chance to learn to speak properly, thus perhaps changing the climate of reception they invoke among others.

The first woman ever permitted to undertake rehabilitation work among men in the Vermont prison system, Professor Moriarty said she was moved to offer the classes in the conviction that even men accustomed to violence could be taught to talk things out instead of taking recourse in violence, or other anti-social behavior.

She also has just finished a communications course for 22 supervisory personnel, many of them nurses, at the Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital, under the auspices of the educational services of the hospital. That course was aimed at improving the general level of communication within the institution, from interviewing to teaching, and thus to help the hospital to be more effective in its principal function of healing and providing health services.

But the real test for Professor Moriarty's belief in the role of communication in human problem-solving and conflict resolution comes this summer when she travels to Northern Ireland to work as a counsellor and activity director at an ecumenical rehabilitation center providing refuge for persons suffering physical or psychological injury in the civil strife racking such cities at Belfast and Londonderry.

At the Corrymeela Community located in Ballycastle a few miles north of Belfast, dedicated to helping Catholics and Protestants alike and sponsored by both the Catholic and Presbyterian churches, Professor Moriarty again will seek to help people find ways to talk out, rather than to fight through, their differences. The volunteer effort, emerging as one of the few rays of hope on the Northern Ireland scene, is currently scheduled to be the subject of a CBS-TV documentary to be shot this summer.

Professor Moriarty, who is a graduate of Rivier College was last in Ireland two years ago completing work on her doctoral dissertation on literary censorship in Ireland. She received her Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1972, when she joined the Dartmouth faculty.