Public Affairs

Lori Kletzer, assistant professor of economics, has received a prestigious grant from the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. The two-year grant for nearly $39,000 will support Kletzer’s work on a book about the effect of increasing foreign competition on U.S. manufacturing and employment. Kletzer’s book will examine the relationship between changes in international trade,…

SANTA CRUZ, CA–In recognition of his academic achievement and his community work, John Brown Childs, professor of sociology at UC Santa Cruz, has received the prestigious Fulbright Thomas Jefferson Chair award for 1997-98. Childs, an expert on contemporary urban issues, will spend a portion of the 1997-98 academic year at the University of Amsterdam in…

SANTA CRUZ, CA–A miniature forest of robotically controlled optical fibers has sprouted from the end of the 120-inch Shane Telescope at Lick Observatory near San Jose, letting astronomers capture and analyze faint rays of light from dozens of distant stars or galaxies at the same time. Named the multi-object spectrograph (MOS), the device is the…

SANTA CRUZ, CA–Next week’s mission to upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope has a distinctly blue-and-gold flair: UC Santa Cruz alumnus Steven Hawley will be one of seven astronauts aboard the space shuttle Discovery, while professor of astronomy and astrophysics Harland Epps helped design one of the telescope’s sophisticated new instruments. Discovery is scheduled to lift…

SANTA CRUZ, CA–The recent signing of the Guatemalan peace accords ended one of this century’s bloodiest civil wars. Susanne Jonas of the Latin American and Latino studies program at UC Santa Cruz is a leading U.S. authority on the war in Guatemala, and she will be participating in a two-day workshop on peacemaking at UCSC…

SANTA CRUZ, CA–A best-selling romance novelist has made a gift to the University of California, Santa Cruz–her alma mater–to establish an important library endowment. The endowment comes from Jayne Ann Krentz, whose contribution of $10,000 has established the Castle Humanities Fund. Interest from the fund, established in Krentz’s maiden name, makes it possible for the…

SANTA CRUZ, CA–A floating team of scientists poking into the Pacific Ocean floor off Costa Rica has unearthed mud that raises puzzling questions about what fuels the volcanoes 125 miles away on shore. Researchers aboard Leg 170 of the Ocean Drilling Program explored the origins of Central American volcanoes and other geological mysteries during a…

SANTA CRUZ, CA–Professor Ray T. Collett, director of the Arboretum at the University of California, Santa Cruz, received the California Horticultural Society Annual Award in San Francisco on Monday, February 3. Collett was honored for his lifelong contributions to California horticulture, including establishing the UCSC Arboretum, introducing new plants to California gardens, and breeding new…

The Stevenson Program on Global Security Winter Colloquium continues on Monday, February 3, with a talk by Jonathan Fox, associate professor of Latin American and Latino studies, on the topic "Taking Stock of the World Bank’s ‘Sustainable Development’ Reforms: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly." The colloquium is held from 3:30 to 4:40 p.m.…

Harry Berger, professor emeritus of literature, is the author of a collection of Shakespeare essays called Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare, which is being released by Stanford University Press at the beginning of February. The book was edited by UCSC alumnus Peter Erickson (who earned a Ph.D. in literature in 1975). A…

A memorial service for Kenneth V. Thimann will take place on Saturday, May 3, at 10 a.m. in the Crown College Dining Hall. More details will be announced in the coming months. Thimann, who died January 15 at the age of 92, was one of the world’s leading botanists. His career spanned more than 50…

Professor of physics Joel Primack and his wife Nancy Ellen Abrams were recognized by the Templeton Exemplary Papers Program for "In a Beginning… Quantum Cosmology and Kabbalah," an article they published in the January/February 1995 issue of Tikkun, a bimonthly Jewish critique of politics, culture, and society. The article earned an award as an exemplary…