School Notes: Graduate School of Arts & Sciences
November/December 2014

Wilbur Cross medals awarded to four alumni

The Graduate School bestowed its highest honor—the Wilbur Cross Medal—on inventor Eric R. Fossum ’84PhD (engineering and applied science), historian Thomas Holt ’73PhD (American studies), reproductive rights expert Kristin Luker ’74PhD (sociology), and Nobel laureate and economist Edmund Phelps ’59PhD (economics) on October 14. The medal recognizes spectacular intellectual accomplishments, public service, teaching, and mentoring.

Fossum, professor of engineering at Dartmouth College, conceived a way to produce a tiny, inexpensive “camera-on-a-chip”—now found in billions of cell phones and tablets. His work has changed the way people communicate and has enhanced medicine (pill cameras), filmmaking (special effects), and automotive safety (side- and rear-view cameras).

Holt, the James Westfall Thompson Distinguished Service Professor of American and African American History at the University of Chicago, has transformed our understanding of American, Caribbean, and transatlantic history, the African diaspora, and race relations.

Luker is the Elizabeth Josselyn Boalt Professor of Law, professor of sociology, and founding director of the Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice at the University of California, Berkeley. A trailblazing thinker and public sociologist, she is largely responsible for creating a new field of study focused on the intersection of reproductive rights and the American justice system.

Phelps, the McVickar Professor of Political Economy and director of the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University, was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2006. His work has dramatically altered the way theorists and policymakers understand the interconnected issues of growth, employment, inflation, and stagnation.

Using allometry to decode evolution

Graduate student Daniel Field (geology and geophysics) explores the evolution of animals with a focus on allometry: the study of relationships between an organism’s size and its shape, anatomy, and behavior. His research on the origin of flight in birds yielded surprising results and earned him the W. D. Hamilton Award from the Society for the Study of Evolution. He quantified relationships between skeletal proportions and body size in modern birds, both flying and flightless. When he applied these metrics to dinosaurs to investigate the origin of avian flight, he found that “specializations of the bird shoulder evolved considerably later than conventionally assumed, casting doubt on the powered flying potential of numerous feathered dinosaurs.”