April 8, 2005
Nina Totenberg, NPR Legal Affairs Correspondent, to Speak at Commencement
May 22
Nina
Totenberg, National Public Radio’s award-winning legal affairs
correspondent, will be the speaker at Mount Holyoke College’s 168th
commencement Sunday, May 22.
Totenberg will be joined by honorary degree recipients Beverly Daniel
Tatum, president of Spelman College and former dean of Mount Holyoke;
Barbara Wilson ’68, program manager for the Center for Space Microelectronics
Technology at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory; and Krisana Kraisintu
of the German Medical Aid Organization, who successfully fought for
universal access to AIDS drugs in southeast Asia and is now doing the same
in Africa.
Totenberg is widely regarded as one of the nation’s leading law reporters.
Her reports on the Supreme Court and legal affairs are heard regularly on NPR’s
newsmagazines All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and Weekend Edition.
She is also a regular panelist on Inside Washington, a weekly syndicated public
affairs
program. A frequent contributor to major newspapers and periodicals, she has
published articles in the New York Times Magazine, the Harvard Law Review,
the Christian Science Monitor, Parade Magazine, New York Magazine, and others.
Her groundbreaking 1991 report on Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment
by Judge Clarence Thomas led the Senate Judiciary Committee to reopen Thomas’s
Supreme Court confirmation hearings to consider Hill’s charges. NPR received
the prestigious George FosterPeabody Award for its gavel-to-gavel coverage—anchored
by Totenberg—of both the original hearings and the inquiry into Hill's
allegations, and for Totenberg’s reports and exclusive interview with
Hill.
Totenberg was named Broadcaster of the Year and honored with the 1998 Sol Taishoff
Award for Excellence in Broadcasting from the National Press Foundation. She
is the first radio journalist to receive the award.
Before joining NPR in 1975, Totenberg served as Washington editor of New Times
Magazine, and before that she was the legal affairs correspondent for the National
Observer.
Beverly Daniel Tatum
Scholar, teacher, author, administrator, and race relations expert, Tatum is
the ninth president of Spelman College. Prior to her appointment to the Spelman
presidency in 2002, she spent 13 years at Mount Holyoke College, serving in various
roles, including professor of psychology, department chair, dean of the College,
and acting president.
Tatum is a clinical psychologist whose areas of research interest include black
families in white communities, racial identity in teens, and the role of race
in the classroom. For more than 20 years, she has taught a course on the psychology
of racism. She has also toured extensively, leading workshops on racial identity
development and its impact in the classroom.
In her critically acclaimed 1997 book Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting
Together in the Cafeteria? and Other Conversations about Race, she applies
her expertise
on race to argue that straight talk about racial identity is essential to
the nation. She is also the author of 1987’s Assimilation Blues: Black Families
in a White Community, and has published numerous articles, including her classic
1992 Harvard Educational Review article “Talking about Race, Learning
about Racism: An Application of Racial Identity Development Theory in the
Classroom.”
Prior to joining the Mount Holyoke faculty in 1989, Tatum was an associate professor
and assistant professor of psychology at Westfield State College and a lecturer
in black studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Barbara Wilson ’68
Wilson is program manager for the Center for Space Microelectronics
Technology at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena,
California, and also
serves as JPL’s chief technologist.
A
physicist with a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison
and a bachelor's degree from Mount Holyoke, Wilson joined
JPL in 1988 as technical group supervisor
of the Microdevices Section. Shortly thereafter she was named manager of
the Microdevices Laboratory, a facility operating under the umbrella
of the Center
for Space Microelectronics Technology.
She most recently served as program manager for JPL’s Earth Science Program
Office and technologist for NASA’s New Millennium Program, which sponsors
spacecraft missions designed to test new technologies so that they may be confidently
used on science missions of the future. She is the recipient of the NASA Special
Achievement Medal for her contributions to the New Millennium Program.
Before joining JPL, she served as supervisor of the Optoelectronic Materials
Research Group at AT&T Bell Labs, where she was awarded the company’s
exceptional contribution award for her work in semiconductor devices.
Krisana Kraisintu
Kraisintu, a noted Thai pharmacist, is working with the German Medical Aid
Organization to develop locally produced, affordable generic drugs for impoverished
AIDS patients
in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, and Tanzania.
Kraisintu’s work to broaden the availability of AIDS drugs in southeast
Asia earned her the title “AIDS Warrior” from her peers. Through
her work, 70,000 AIDS/HIV patients in Thailand and an additional 30,000
patients in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam gained access to affordable treatment.
Kraisintu
and her research team have worked on formulation development and bioequivalence
studies of HIV/AIDS-related drugs since 1992. Thailand became the first
developing country to make these affordable drugs relatively widely available.
Kraisintu received a bachelor’s degree in pharmacy from Chiengmai University,
Thailand, in 1975; a master’s degree in pharmaceutical analysis from
Strathclyde University, UK, in 1978; and a doctorate in pharmaceutical
chemistry from Bath
University, UK, in 1981. For the past 22 years, she has worked in the pharmaceutical
industry in various roles of quality assurance, manufacturing, research
and development, and business development for the discovery, development,
and commercialization
of chemical and natural pharmaceutical products.
Kraisintu received a Gold Medal at Eureka Fiftieth World Exhibition of Innovation,
Research, and New Technology in Brussels in 2001, and a Global Scientific
Award in 2004 from the Letten Foundation in recognition of her outstanding
scientific
contribution in the field of HIV/AIDS.
2005
Commencement & College
Ceremonies
Commencement
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