Arvidson, Waterston receive faculty achievement awards

By Tony Fitzpatrick and Brendan Watson

For their outstanding academic accomplishments, Raymond E. Arvidson, Ph.D., and Robert H. Waterston, M.D., Ph.D., have been named recipients of faculty achievement awards for 2001.

Arvidson, the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor and chair of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences, has been awarded the Arthur Holly Compton Faculty Achievement Award. Waterston, the James S. McDonnell Professor and head of the Department of Genetics, director of the Genome Sequencing Center and professor of anatomy and neurobiology at the School of Medicine, is the Carl and Gerty Cori Faculty Achievement Award recipient.

Named head of the Department of Genetics in 1991, Waterston founded the Genome Sequencing Center in 1993. The center was a principal member of the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium, the public effort to complete the working draft. Centers from France, Germany, Japan, China, Great Britain and the United States collaborated on the project.

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Sophomore Smilowitz works for passage of Younger Americans Act

By Neil Schoenherr

Ben Smilowitz, sophomore political science major in Arts & Sciences, has been instrumental in helping draft and lobby for the Younger Americans Act (YAA), a bill currently in committee before the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.

The bill will create a national youth policy based on the fact that young people are critical resources for community building.

If passed, YAA would allocate $5 billion over four years to community-based organizations to engage youth as leaders and decision-makers at the local and federal level. Through the act, community boards would be established across the country--one-third of the boards would be youth --to determine where YAA money goes. Also, an Office of National Youth Policy would be established at the White House.

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Admissions University's front door

By Jessica N. Roberts

Nobody watches their mailbox as closely as a high school senior during April.

Double that excitement and you'll come close to the Univers-ity's Office of Undergraduate Admissions' enthusiasm for the entire college-selection process.

Working on a cyclical schedule, the admissions office spends each part of the year focused on attracting superior, well-rounded students to the University.

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Seismologists map active region's mantle flow pattern

By Tony Fitzpatrick

University seismologists and colleagues at Brown University and Scripps Institute of Oceanography have mapped the flow pattern of the Earth's mantle in one of the most seismically active regions in the world.

Using a unique array of sea-floor seismometers deployed in 1994, Gideon Smith, Ph.D., senior research scientist of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, and Douglas Wiens, Ph.D., professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, have mapped out how the mantle flow pattern varies near the Tonga subduction zone in the south Pacific Ocean, where a plate on Earth's surface descends into the mantle.

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