Milestones

More news of Yale people

Remembered

John B. Fenn '40PhD, a former Yale professor who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2002, died in Richmond, Virginia, on December 10. He was 93. Fenn was a chemical engineering professor at Yale from 1967 until he faced mandatory retirement in 1987. In 1994, he became a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he continued to work until his death. The work that won him his Nobel Prize—a refinement of mass spectrometry technology—also led to years of legal dispute with Yale over the commercial rights to his discovery; in 2005, a federal judge ordered him to pay the university $1 million. The Graduate School gave Fenn its highest alumni honor, the Wilbur Cross Medal, in 2003.

 

Frank M. Turner '71PhD, the John Hay Whitney Professor of History, Yale's University Librarian, and a former university provost, died on November 11 of a pulmonary embolism. Turner's scholarship focused on nineteenth-century European intellectual thought, particularly in the Victorian period. His sudden death at age 66 came just months after he was appointed to a five-year term at the helm of Yale's library system. Former Graduate School dean Jon Butler will serve as acting librarian.

 

Psychiatrist and historian of science David F. Musto '61MA died October 8 while traveling in Shanghai. He was 74. Musto, the country's foremost historian of U.S. drug and alcohol policy, was a professor of the history of medicine at the medical school and a professor of child psychiatry at the Child Study Center. He began teaching at Yale in 1969 and served on many national advisory panels. His most famous scholarly work was The American Disease, a history of U.S. drug prohibition.

 

Honored

Five Elis will study in England next year as winners of Rhodes and Marshall scholarships. Winners of the Rhodes are Alice Baumgartner '10 and William Zeng '11. Marshall winners are Andrew Mangino '09, Mari Oye '11, and Elizabeth Deutsch '11. 

 

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