January 3, 1996 Contact: Francine Tyler (408/459-2495)

A LITERATURE PROFESSOR, A NEWSDAY REPORTER, AND A STAFF MEMBER RECEIVE UCSC ALUMNI ASSOCIATION AWARDS

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SANTA CRUZ, CA--An English literature professor and a Newsday reporter have won the University of California, Santa Cruz, Alumni Association's annual Distinguished Teaching and Alumni Achievement awards for 1995. An employee of the Board of Studies in Sociology won the university's first-ever Outstanding Staff Award.

Michael Warren, professor of English literature and a fellow of Cowell College, won the Distinguished Teaching Award in recognition of his outstanding teaching of undergraduate students.

Laurie Garrett, author of The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance and a science and medical reporter for Newsday, won the Alumni Achievement Award. The award recognizes alumni who have made outstanding contributions to their fields, rendered remarkable service to UCSC, and brought distinction to the university through personal achievement. Garrett earned a bachelor's degree in biology from UCSC in 1975.

Susan Curtis, the lead assistant for the Sociology Board, won the Outstanding Staff Award. The award recognizes staff who have given sustained, distinguished service to student life, promoted the growth and improvement of UCSC's programs, and helped preserve its intellectual and physical environment. It carries a $500 stipend.

The three were nominated for the awards by students, alumni, faculty, and staff, and were selected by the UCSC Alumni Association Council.

They will be honored at a ceremony on Saturday, February 3, from 12:30 to 2 p.m. in the dining hall at UCSC's Stevenson College. In addition to the awards being presented to Warren, Garrett, and Curtis, eleven students will be honored for service to their colleges. The ceremony is open to the public.

Michael Warren

Warren has spent a career doing for UCSC's undergraduates what he wishes had been done for him as a student: demystifying the study of literature. His teaching interests concern earlier English writers, especially Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but also postwar British drama.

"When I was at Oxford as an undergraduate, the whole thing was taught as a mystery--how people arrived at the conclusions they got to in literary criticism was never clear," Warren says. "I try to show students how I come to the conclusions I do, so they can reach their own."

Warren teaches his courses--many of them large introductory lecture classes--with a sense of humor, a love of his subjects, and a great desire to see his students learn. He strives to make Shakespeare's plays and other literature understandable, exciting, and accessible.

In recent course evaluations, Warren's students described him as knowledgeable, dynamic, humorous, devoted, and approachable. His teaching assistants noted the care he took in reviewing class material with them and teaching them how to do their job.

Warren especially enjoys teaching lower-division undergraduates. "It is a chance to reach students early, to give them a foundation for interpreting all kinds of literature, and particularly the works of earlier writers," he says. He feels fortunate to work in a board of studies and a college where such a high value is placed on teaching.

Warren joined UCSC as an assistant professor in 1968 after earning a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and teaching at the University of Victoria in Canada. He earned his bachelor's degree from Balliol College, Oxford, and a master's degree from Dalhousie University in Canada. His numerous print contributions include two books on Shakespeare's King Lear.

Laurie Garrett

A science and medical writer for Newsday who also worked for National Public Radio and as a freelancer in southern Europe and East Africa, Garrett spent more than a decade researching her book, The Coming Plague.

The book is a comprehensive and almost encyclopedic look at a multitude of diseases that have emerged or reemerged worldwide over the last three decades. Its subjects range from malaria, cholera, and newly discovered viral hemorrhagic fevers, to Legionnaires' disease, toxic shock syndrome, and AIDS.

"In my travels overseas I could see diseases that I thought had been conquered were in fact killing children right and left," Garrett says. "The first time I saw a child dying of measles, I learned the folly of ever describing any disease as minor or eradicated."

Instead, rising population densities, the advent of jet travel, environmental destruction, and changing social mores are among the many factors exacerbating the emergence and spread of disease.

Since its publication in October 1994, the 750-page book has received widespread acclaim. Newspapers and journals from the New York Times to the New England Journal of Medicine have published favorable reviews, and the San Francisco Chronicle hailed the book as "the clearest, most detailed and most impeccably researched description of the science of microbiology that lay readers have had since Paul de Kruif's Microbe Hunters of 60 years ago."

Garrett wrote The Coming Plague as a wake-up call to the world.

"I'm trying to sound an alarm that warns people at all levels of society, regardless of their work or what they do, that far from defeating the microbes, we face a whole new force of microbial threats," she says.

Susan Curtis

Although life-and-death issues are seldom a part of Susan Curtis's job at UCSC's Sociology Board, she treats all that's asked of her as if it were.

People are a priority, she says. "It's hard for me to close the door on someone, to put them off," Curtis explains. "I'll help if I can."

Curtis joined UCSC's Division of Social Sciences twenty years ago and a year later became a board assistant at the Sociology Board. Her nearly two decades of experience at the board means that faculty, students, and other staff call on her often for answers, opinions, and advice.

"She is not only our best source of knowledge about the campus and board itself--she is, indeed, our true institutional memory--but the very best source of wisdom, thoughtful judgment, calming stability, and emotional support on the board," wrote Sociology Board chair Craig Haney in a letter recommending her for the award.

As the lead board assistant, Curtis works with the board chair, the graduate director, and two other board assistants to run the more than 440-student board.

Curtis, who holds a credential to teach grades K-8, says she never imagined she'd work for UCSC for twenty years. "I used to chuckle at my aunt who was on the same job for 40 years," she says. "I never would have pictured doing this--or doing anything--for this long."

Tickets for the awards ceremony are $12, including lunch. For reservations, call the Alumni Office at (408) 459-2530.

This release is also available on the World Wide Web at UCSC's "Services for Journalists" site (http://www.ucsc.edu/news/journalist.html).

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