In Brief
• James Heitman, a molecular biologist at Duke Medical
Center, has been awarded the Amgen Award for research that has led
to “an enlightened understanding of human disease and therapy
in transplantation biology and infectious disease.” The award,
presented by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology,
is among the most prestigious offered in the fields of biochemistry
and molecular biology. He is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator
who specializes in research on how human cells react to infectious
disease and to foreign cells acquired through transplantation. His
research could lead to new drugs and treatments for transplant recipients.
• David Jarmul has been named associate vice president
of news and communications. He was deputy director of the Howard Hughes
Medical Institute’s communications department and head of its
Web team. In the newly created post, he will be responsible for leading
Duke’s Web efforts, especially the content of the university’s
top-level Web pages. Succeeding Al Rossiter Jr., he also will lead
Duke News Service, supervising a staff of journalists who provide
news and information about research, programs, and events at Duke
to print and broadcast media. Before joining HHMI, Jarmul worked for
nearly a decade at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington,
D.C., where he was deputy director of its news and public information
office. An honors graduate in American history from Brown University,
Jarmul served as a Peace Corps volunteer for two years in Nepal, wrote
radio programs for Voice of America, worked as a business reporter
in San Francisco, and was editor of a magazine produced by Volunteers
in Technical Assistance, a nonprofit organization that provides assistance
to developing countries.
• George Pearsall, professor of mechanical engineering
and material sciences, will receive the ASME-Triodyne Safety Award
from the Design Division of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
The award, to be presented in November, is given annually for significant
contributions to teaching, research, or practice in the safety aspects
of mechanical design. The selection committee accented Pearsall’s
consulting activities in the areas of failure analysis, risk assessment,
and safe-products design.
• Time magazine has placed Stanley Hauerwas, Gilbert
T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics in the Divinity School, and
Mike Krzyzewski, men’s basketball coach, on its list of America’s
best. In the issue dated September 17, the newsweekly listed Hauerwas
as America’s “Best Theologian” and Krzyzewski as America’s
“Best Coach.” Hauerwas was described as “contemporary
theology’s foremost intellectual provocateur.” In February,
he became the first United Methodist theologian to deliver the Gifford
Lectures in St. Andrews, Scotland; the Giffords are widely regarded
as the world’s most distinguished lecture series in the fields
of philosophy, natural theology, and religion. Krzyzewski, an eleven-time
National Coach of the Year who has coached at Duke for twenty-one
seasons, led Duke to its third national championship in 2001. In October,
he will be inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of
Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts.
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