MOUNT HOLYOKE HONORS
FOUR FACULTY MEMBERS
FOR OUTSTANDING TEACHING, SCHOLARSHIP

SOUTH HADLEY, Mass. – Four Mount Holyoke faculty members—a scholar of literature, a mathematician and statistician, a physicist, and a geologist—were honored for outstanding teaching and scholarship Monday, April 21. George Cobb, Robert L. Rooke Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, and Lauret Savoy, associate professor of geology, received the Mount Holyoke College Faculty Prize for Teaching. Christopher Benfey, professor of English and codirector of the Weissman Center for Leadership, and Howard Nicholson, Kennedy-Schelkunoff Professor of Physics, were given the Meribeth E. Cameron Faculty Prize for Scholarship.

During ceremonies in McCulloch Auditorium, President Joanne V. Creighton presented each with a citation and a check for $2,500.

The awardees were selected through a nomination and review process coordinated by the Faculty Awards Committee, composed of Dean of Faculty Donal O’Shea, faculty members Jim Coleman and Peter Berek, and retired faculty members Sarah Montgomery (chair) and Diana Stein. Faculty nominated their peers for the scholarship award, while students, alumnae, and faculty nominated professors for the teaching award. “Mount Holyoke’s faculty deserve all the awards we can give them,” said O’Shea. “They work hard at both teaching and scholarship and produce an abundance of outstanding work on both fronts.”

Given for the first time three years ago, the awards were made possible by gifts from members of the MHC board of trustees. The donor of the teaching award wishes to remain anonymous. Trustee Janet Hickey Tague ’66 endowed the scholarship award in honor of Meribeth E. Cameron, Professor Emeritus of History and former acting president and academic dean at MHC.

Past winners of the awards are Jonathan Lipman, professor of history; Lynn Morgan, professor of anthropology; Anthony Lee, associate professor of art; Susan Smith, Norma Wait Harris and Emma Gale Harris Foundation Professor of Biological Sciences; Rachel Fink, associate professor of biological sciences; Penny Gill, Mary Lyon Professor of the Humanities and professor of politics; Joan Cocks, professor of politics; James Coleman, professor of dance and arts coordinator; Sean Decatur, associate professor of chemistry; Indira Peterson, professor of Asian studies; Joseph Ellis, professor of history; and Elizabeth Young, associate professor of English.

Christopher Benfey
Christopher Benfey has emerged over the past decade as a prolific critic, essayist, and author, whose reviews in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, the New Republic, the New York Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement have established him as a distinguished contemporary arbiter of modern and late twentieth-century American literature. Benfey’s interests and scholarship transcend academic disciplines— ranging from art and literature to social history. In addition to his work on literary figures and movements, Benfey, who is well known as an Emily Dickinson scholar, has served as an art critic for the online magazine Slate and is the author of the critically acclaimed Degas in New Orleans (1997), in which he explores little-known aspects of the life and work of the nineteenth-century French impressionist painter. The book was named one of the ten most important books of 1997 by the Chicago Tribune. Benfey is also the author of The Double Life of Stephen Crane (1992) and Emily Dickinson and the Problem of Others (1984). His poems have appeared in the Paris Review and Ploughshares. Cultural exchange between New England and Japan during the Gilded Age is the topic of Benfey’s current research and of his new book, The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan, which has just been released. Benfey has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

George Cobb
George Cobb is a leader in the area of statistics reform who believes that statistics is “almost impossible to learn unless you get your hands dirty.” Cobb uses a variety of unusual activities to teach students the basics of statistical methods, ranging from experimental design to regression analysis. In one exercise he designed, a catapult is used to launch gummy bears in the air, exploring such principles as sources of variability, the value of protocol to keep things constant, and the use of randomization to protect against bias. During data collection, students contend with catapult misfires and the most effective way to record them. Cobb maintains that when students have a hand in creating data, they are more interested in analyzing them and learn from being part of the production process. Whether catapulting gummy bears or chairing national committees on undergraduate education in his field, Cobb is concerned with finding new and better ways to teach statistics. Beginning in the 1980s he was at the forefront of redesigning introductory statistics, as computers liberated faculty to set their students to work with real data. More recently, Cobb has turned to the content and pedagogy of more advanced classes. He is responsible for newly designed courses in Markov Chain Monte Carlo, linear statistical methods, and mathematical statistics, and expanded versions handouts and problem sets for each of these will be included in textbooks. Cobb is the author of Introduction to Design and Analysis of Experiments (1998), and Statistics in Action: Practical Principles for a World of Uncertainty, written with Richard L. Scheaffer and Ann E. Watkins and just published.

He has written and spoken widely to varied audiences of statisticians, mathematicians, and educators; has led major initiatives in statistical education; and has received grant support for his innovative work.

Howard Nicholson
Howard Nicholson is one of the rare physicists who have made substantial contributions to major scientific research while teaching at a small college. Considered a universal physicist, he knows electronics, software, and how to manage small and large collaborations. Nicholson’s doctoral studies on experimental high-energy physics were carried out at California Institute of Technology and were completed in 1971. Since then, he has conducted research at other prestigious institutions including Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Stanford, and Brookhaven National Laboratory. He is a member of the Calorimeter Group at the Stanford Linear Accelerator, and at Stanford, has been a run coordinator working on the $280 million BaBar project, one of the three highest priority high-energy physics experiments currently being supported by the United States Department of Energy. Last year, he was responsible for the quality and quantity of the experimental data obtained in the experiment, and he was on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week for six months, serving the approximately 500 international scientists working on this project.Nicholson is a member of the extravehicular collaboration at the Brookhaven National Laboratory researching the behavior of elementary particles in atomic nuclei. Nicholson’s research has been continuously funded by the Department of Energy since 1978. As noted by a physics colleague at UMass, his research grant in this field is the only federal grant awarded to a physicist at a four-year college.

Lauret Savoy
Lauret Savoy believes that human history and natural history are braided strands of human existence. Their connections guided her undergraduate work as she first explored studio art (landscape photography), then history (American studies and geography), and geology. A teacher, earth scientist, writer, photographer, and pilot, Savoy tries to challenge students to examine their assumptions about the world, and she enjoys “helping them see what a very human endeavor the inquiry of nature is,” she says. Savoy teaches interdisciplinary courses on human-Earth interactions through time (Perspectives on American Environmental History and Evolution of North American Landscapes), and coteaches with English professor John Lemly a course on nature writing (Reading and Writing in the World). She is also a woman of African American, Native American, and Euro-American ancestry. Her work now turns from geologic studies to “interdisciplinary reflections on the stories we tell of land, its origin and history, and stories we tell of ourselves in the land,” Savoy says. In a just-published anthology of essays, The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World, which she coedited with poet-essayist Alison Deming, diverse writers of color explore “cultural hybridity and difference in human interactions with environment and place.” Savoy has been the recipient of professional awards and has published widely. In 1996, she was featured in a CD-ROM, along with other women scientists, that was designed to show girls age ten and above what it's like to be a scientist. The disc is a part of the Smithsonian Institution’s permanent Science in American Life exhibition. Visitors to the Smithsonian's Museum of American History can use the CD, which is installed in an interactive kiosk and provides text, visual displays, and audio.