May 24, 1999

Accolades

Paul Whitworth

Word is getting out to the rest of the world that some of the country's best theater takes place right here on campus during Shakespeare Santa Cruz's annual summer festival. In what smacks of a very Shakespearean coincidence, two newspapers recently came out with different but related stories that both applauded the theater company.

The first round of praise came from San Francisco Chronicle theater critic Steven Winn, who wrote an article on the ten best actors in the San Francisco Bay Area. One of Winn's favorites is Paul Whitworth, artistic director of Shakespeare Santa Cruz (SSC) and a UCSC professor of theater arts. Of Whitworth, Winn said, "In 15 seasons with the company [Whitworth] has played kings, fools and lovers with an authority unmatched by any actor doing Shakespeare in the region. It's tempting to call his command of the verse instinctive, but that's too easy in the face of his singular intelligence and passion."

Meanwhile, of more than 130 known Shakespeare festivals in the U.S., Shakespeare Santa Cruz was singled out as one of the best in North America in a recent story in USA Today. The paper may not be known for its high cultural sensibility, but the source they relied on certainly is. That source is Libby Appel, artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, considered the country's premiere venue for Shakespeare.

Photo: Shmuel Thaler

Suzanne Alonzo, a postdoctoral researcher in environmental studies, has been awarded a two-year National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics.

Alonzo has spent eight months working on krill life histories with Marc Mangel, a professor of environmental studies and the Institute of Marine Sciences. With the new grant, Alonzo will continue to work on some problems of krill but will focus her efforts on the development of dynamic game methodology in biology. She and Mangel hope to make dynamic state variable models accessible to the broader community of ecologists and evolutionary biologists. They will collaborate on the development of the concepts, the code, and the sharing of the techniques.

Thomas Oechel

Junior Thomas Oechel is UCSC's first-ever NCAA Division III national singles champion. He played teammate Brian Cummings for the title on May 20 at the 1999 NCAA III men's tennis national championships in Claremont. Then Oechel and Cummings went on to win the doubles title, their second straight national NCAA III doubles championship, by defeating Kalamazoo 6-2, 6-2. Tournament awards went to Brian Cummings (national Senior Player of the Year), Danny Kim (national Player to Watch), and Nick Cunningham (west region Rookie of the Year).

Photo: Dorth Raphaely

Complete NCAA III men's tennis results

To the Currents home page

To UCSC's home page