April 28, 1997

Awards and Honors

Robert Kraft, professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics and astronomer emeritus, UC Observatories/Lick Observatory, was elected a foreign associate of Great Britain's Royal Astronomical Society. According to the society's council, Kraft was honored in recognition of his "outstanding work in stellar astrophysics," particularly his research on cataclysmic binaries and stellar rotation. Founded in 1820, the Royal Astronomical Society encourages and promotes astronomy and geophysics.

Lawrence Andrews (photo), assistant professor of theater arts, is a recipient of a Eureka Fellowship Award. The awards are presented every three years to 12 San Francisco Bay Area artists by the Fleishhacker Foundation. The award comes with a $15,000 prize. For the current awards, 60 Bay Area arts organizations were invited to nominate three artists each and those nominations were then juried by a number of the country's leading art curators. A group exhibition of works by the award recipients is on display through May 4 at the San Jose Museum of Art, 110 South Market St. For more information on the exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art, call (408) 294-2787.

Andrews will use the award to fund a film project he was just beginning when the award was announced. Andrews describes the project as "a feature-length narrative film that uses as it starting point the life of the 1900s African American explorer Matthew Henson and Maroon communities in the Caribbean." Andrews's works have been displayed previously in such venues as San Francisco's Capp Street Project and Museum of Modern Art and, in New York, the Whitney Museum, The Kitchen, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

Danny Scheie, assistant professor of theater arts, recently won a Bay Area Critics Circle award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Kevin, a ghost, in Your Everyday Ghost Story. The play, by Lanford Wilson, premiered at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco as part of the "Pieces of the Quilt" series. Recipients of the annual awards are selected by San Francisco Bay Area theater critics.

Winners of the 31st Annual Book Collection Contest were recognized in a ceremony held April 17 in McHenry Library. The annual contest, which is sponsored by the Friends of the UCSC Library, features a competition for UCSC students, one for local high school students, and one for high school freshmen. This year, all high school winners were from Santa Cruz High School. The winners are Molly Newman (first place/UCSC) for "Medieval Fact and Fancy," Justin Freitas (second place/UCSC) for "The American Comic Strip," Mike Castellanos (third place/UCSC) for "Military History," Luisa Magarian (first place/high school senior) for "A Question of My Destiny," Tess Bridgeman (second place/high school senior) for "From Music to Emotion," Seth Atkinson (third place/high school senior) for "Ask Not What Your Earth Can Do For You," Simone Leask (first place/high school freshman) for "Photography," Rachel Knutson (second place/high school freshman) for "The Life of an Artist," and Gwyneve Wilson (third place/high school freshman) for "The Power of Strings." A special prize was awarded to senior Phaela Peck for a poetry submission.

The Dr. Earl H. Myers and Ethel M. Myers Oceanographic and Marine Biology Trust of Pebble Beach has granted $22,450 to 22 UCSC students who conduct marine-related research. Each year the trust supports the work of outstanding student researchers in the Monterey Bay Area. The trust was established by the estates of Earl H. Myers, an internationally known oceanographic biologist at Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station who died in 1975, and his wife and research assistant Ethel M. Myers, who died in 1985. This year's awards, which range from $500 to $1,500, went to the following graduate students: Stian Alesandrini, Todd Baumgartner, Susanne Fork, Neil Harrington, Bradford Keitt, Eric Mielbrecht, Dawn Noren, Colleen Reichmuth, Stephanie Smathers, and Brandon Southall, all master's students in ocean sciences; Cristin Amico, Karen Crow, Matthew Edwards, Sean Hayes, Steve Lonhart, and Michelle Wainstein, doctoral students in biology; Robert Burton, Kelly MacGregor, Laura Moore, and Deirdre Scholar, doctoral students in earth sciences; and Jason Gedamke and Jill Pettinger, incoming master's students in ocean sciences.

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