May 20, 2005
About the Honorary Degree
Recipients
Nina Totenberg
Doctor of Humane Letters
Nina 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 Foster Peabody 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.
Beverly
Daniel Tatum
Doctor of Humane Letters
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 during her tenure as 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 applied her expertise on race to argue that straight
talk about racial identity
is
essential to the nation. She is also the author of Assimilation Blues:
Black Families in a White Community (1987) 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.”
Barbara
Wilson ’68
Doctor of Science
Barbara Wilson is program manager for the Center for Space Microelectronics
Technology at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 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.
Krisana
Kraisintu
Doctor of Science
Krisana 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 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 as recognition of her outstanding
scientific
contribution in the field of HIV/AIDS.
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