Robert E. Habel

August 8, 1918 – January 22, 2013

Dr. Robert E. Habel became Professor Emeritus of Veterinary Anatomy at the College of Veterinary Medicine (CVM) at Cornell University when he retired in 1978. He was born and raised in Toledo, Ohio. His parents were descended from German, Swiss and Scotch-Irish immigrants. During the summer, Dr. Habel often visited the farms run by his grandparents, uncles and aunts. While at Devilbiss High School in Toledo, Ohio he excelled in the study of German and learned freestyle wrestling at the YMCA. Dr. Habel received his D.V.M. degree from the CVM at The Ohio State University in 1941. Following graduation, he joined the Meat Inspection Division of the U.S.D.A in Philadelphia. In 1942 he was drafted as a private in the U.S. Army and then was transferred to the Army Veterinary Corps in 1943 as 1st Lieutenant. He was initially stationed in Dallas, Texas where he attended night classes at SMU to learn Russian. Then he was assigned to Calcutta, India for meat inspection duty following which he was reassigned to head the meat inspection detachment in Kunming, China. While in the China- Burma-India theater, he also attended to the health of the army mules and continued his study of Russian by correspondence. In 1946, he was discharged from the regular Army as Major and in 1967, he retired from the U.S. Army Reserve as a Lt. Colonel. In 1946, he was appointed Instructor in Veterinary Anatomy at the CVM at The Ohio State University where he earned his M.Sc. degree in 1947.

In 1947, Dr. Habel was recruited by Dr. Malcolm Miller, Head of the Department of Anatomy at the CVM at Cornell University and appointed Assistant Professor. In 1956 he received his M.V.D. from the University of Utrecht for his studies on the innervation of the ruminant stomach. In 1960, Dr. Habel was appointed Professor and Head of the Department of Anatomy at Cornell University, a position he held until 1976.

Dr. Habel was recognized by his anatomical peers throughout the world for his professional excellence. He readily translated French, German, Dutch and Russian. In 1979, he served as a senior staff member in the Department of Functional Morphology at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands and in 1981 he was a Williams Visiting Scholar in the Department of Anatomy at the University of Sydney in Australia. He served as president of the American Association of Veterinary Anatomists (1965-1966) and the World Association of Veterinary Anatomists (1971-1975). He received a Distinguished Alumnus Award from The Ohio State University in 1983, was honored in 1988 with the Outstanding Achievement Award by the American Association of Veterinary Anatomists and in 1996 received the Outstanding Service Award from the New York State Veterinary Medical Society.

Dr. Habel was one of the founding members of the International Association of Veterinary Anatomists (IAVA) in 1957. At their meeting in Freiburg, Germany, the IAVA established the International Committee on Veterinary Anatomical Nomenclature (ICVAN) and elected Dr. Habel to chair the subcommittee on Splanchnology. At the next meeting of the ICVAN in 1963, he was appointed Vice Chairman and as part of the editorial committee was instrumental in establishing the first edition of Nomina Anatomica Veterinaria (NAV) in 1968. Dr. Habel continued as chairman of the subcommittee on Splanchnology up to and including the fourth edition of the NAV in 1994. He was appointed Chair of ICVAN from 1980-1986. Together with other colleagues, he elaborated and further developed the principles and criteria of the ICVAN, thus creating the solid basis for a veterinary anatomical nomenclature that received worldwide acceptance. The 5th edition of the NAV was respectfully dedicated to Dr. Habel, amongst others, in appreciation and gratitude for the many years of expert work of this outstanding veterinary anatomist.

Dr. Habel was a dedicated and skilled anatomist both in his dissection of specimens and his detailed description of his findings. He strove for perfection in his anatomical descriptions and did not tolerate subpar performance in himself, his departmental colleagues or his students. On a personal level, Dr. John Cummings and I (AD) were his graduate students in the early 60s and both of us were appointed to faculty positions in his department through his efforts. As graduate students, we both experienced handing in 10 pages of manuscript and getting back 20 of corrections. After our initial faculty appointments, he often sat in on our lectures. John and I knew that if he said nothing after our presentation, it was acceptable. He only let us know when some thing we said was not quite right.

At the Cornell University CVM, Dr. Habel established a course in applied anatomy for third year veterinary students that was very popular as students could directly relate their anatomical learning to its clinical application. He is well remembered by his Cornell students for the rigor of his course. His frequent brief oral examinations in this course came to be known as “Habelgrams.” Dr. Habel kept score of answers on an umpire’s ball and strike clicker. The sound of the click or the lack thereof was clearly audible to the student so there was no wondering how you did on the quiz. Dr. Habel regularly attended the weekly senior seminars and continued to do so for many years after his retirement. We believe that he did this in respect for the remarkable efforts of the students, his interest in clinical medicine and to be sure they were anatomically correct. As testimony to his teaching, he received the Norden Teaching Award in 1975.

On a personal note, I (AD) owe Dr. Habel for my opportunity to develop a teaching program for first year veterinary students that directly correlated the teaching of neuroanatomy with clinical neurology. As an applied anatomist, he saw the value of the direct correlation of basic and applied sciences in the education of the veterinary students.

Dr. Habel was an avid fan of The Ohio State University and Cornell University athletic teams and he regularly attended wrestling matches on the Cornell campus. Those of us who worked closely with Dr. Habel remember him for his dedication to academic integrity and excellence, his application of anatomy to clinical diagnosis and treatment, and his dedication to a valid universal veterinary anatomical nomenclature.

As a veterinary anatomist Dr. Habel published many anatomical articles in professional journals and authored or co-authored the following textbooks:

Budras, KE , Habel, RE: Bovine Anatomy an Illustrated Text. 2 editions de Lahunta, A, Habel, RE: Applied Veterinary Anatomy Habel, RE: Applied Anatomy: a Laboratory Guide for Veterinary Students. 5 editions Habel, RE: Applied Veterinary Anatomy. 2 editions Habel, RE: Guide to the Dissection of Domestic Ruminants. 4 editions Habel, RE: Guide to the Dissection of the Cow. 3 editions Orsini, PG, Morrison, AR, Habel, RE: Habel’s Guide to the Dissection of Domestic Ruminants. Rooney, JR, Sack, WO, Habel, RE: Guide to the Dissection of the Horse Sack, WO, Habel, RE: Rooney’s Guide to the Dissection of the Horse. 6 editions Schaller, O, Constantinescu, GM, Habel, RE, Sack, WO, Simoens, P, de Vos, NR: Illustrated Veterinary Anatomical Nomenclature. 2 editions Trautman, A, Fiebiger, J: Fundamentals of the Histology of Domestic Animals. Translated by: Habel, RE and Biberstein, EL. World Association of Veterinary Anatomists. International Committee on Veterinary Gross Anatomical Nomenclature: Nomina Anatomica Veterinaria. 5 editions The ultimate testimony of Dr. Habel’s dedication to teaching was his donation of his body to the Department of Anatomy at the Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse, NY.

Alexander de Lahunta, Chairperson; Abraham Bezuidenhout, Maurice White

Alan J. Hahn

March 3, 1940 – May 21, 2011

Alan J. Hahn, 71, Professor Emeritus of policy analysis and management, who taught political science and focused on education about public dispute resolution, died May 21 in Denver, Colorado.

Born March 3, 1940, in Gary, Ind., he was the son of the late Adam Hahn and Mary Jacoby Hahn. His wife Lau ie Hahn, his aunts Caroline Hahn and Elizabeth Samson, survive him.

He received his bachelor's degree in sociology, masters in government and doctorate in political science, all from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. He worked in the area of public policy education in the Department of Consumer Economics and Housing in Cornell's College of Human Ecology from 1969 to 1976. He then joined the college's Department of Human Service Studies until he retired in 1996. While a faculty member Alan served on various Cornell Coopera ive Extension Agent Faculty Committees and the Advisory Board of the Community and Rural Development Institute. Alan advised numerous Master and Doctoral candidates and was valued for his expertise as a teacher and his professional guidance as a mentor.

Hahn served on the Cooperative Extension Northeast Public Policy Education Committee and was a presenter at a number of national public policy conferences. He was a leader of the 1993-94 Public Issues Education Task Force of the National Public Policy Education Committee, which led to publication of the monograph "Public Issues Education: Increasing Competence in Resolving Public Issues." He also authored The Politics of Caring: Human Services at the Local Level (1994), “Resolving Public Issues and Concerns through Policy Education” among ther publications. “Educating about Public Issues: Lessons from Eleven Innovat ve Public Policy Education Projects” co-authored with Jennifer Greene was funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and became an important resource to scholars studying the development of public policy education and practitioners who wanted to understand the process.

Cooperative Extension professionals knew Professor Hahn across the United States for his advice on community development and public policy education. His willingness to work directly with community groups and to conduct applied research projects in the field served as further evidence of his commitment to experiential learning. According to the Farm Foundation, Hahn "made major contributions to his fellow extension educators through his leadership in advancing public issues education methodology. Hahn's insights from the disciplines of government and public affairs have helped in addressing the complexities of modern issues, changing decision-making processes and new extension audiences."

Alan is remembered by his colleagues and students for his ‘little smile” when amused by something and his quiet patient manner. It was often said that he was a most skillful listener but when he spoke it was with deep insight and substance. He enjoyed traveling, hiking mountains and taking pictures of wild flowers. He often found himself in the company of the “birding” folks in the Lab of Ornithology and enjoyed the company of similar minded community members on their travels and hikes. His pictures and essays online are a continuing tribute to his love of the outdoors.

Alan, in describing his post retirement life, said, “Now, my chief occupations are hiking in wild places (not necessarily big wilderness areas, but little pockets of wildness, too), photographing them, and writing about them. I love the Internet for the outlet it provides for my photographs (Flickr) and my essays on wildness, travel, and mountains (BlogSpot)”.

Donald Tobias, Chairperson; Josephine Allen, Nancy Potter

Emil J. Haller

January 5, 1933 – November 20, 2011

Emil J. Haller, husband, father, outdoorsman, and scholar, passed away on November 20, 2011 surrounded by his loving wife and cherished family. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri on January 5, 1933 to Walter and Consuelo Haller. Raised with humble and blue-collar roots, Emil earned his B.S. degree from the University of Missouri in Education and later earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1966. He served his country as 1st lieutenant in the U.S. Army from 1955-1958 and taught middle school from 1958-1963 before earning his Ph.D.

Beginning in 1968, Emil became a professor of educational administration in the Department of Education at Cornell University where he served for 30 years. He was a scholar who didn’t suffer fools and relished his role as iconoclast both in his teaching and research. Emil taught undergraduate and graduate students with the same standard and care, and he was not afraid to tell students or colleagues what he honestly thought about their work. A productive and influential scholar of educational administration, Emil partnered often with his colleagues on research and applied policy projects. He is best known for his work on the effect of teacher expectations on student achievement (contradicting widely established beliefs), administrator quality and ethics, and school district reorganization. After 30 years, he retired from Cornell in 1997 with Emeritus status.

Emil was a loving and complex man. First and foremost he was a family man. Emil was not one for maudlin sentimentalities, had little tolerance for nonsense, and was willing to tell you what he thought, but (usually) only if you asked. Every conversation with Emil included at least one story of his wife, his children, and one or more of his grandchildren or great-grandchildren. His pride in his children and eventually his grandchildren and great-grandchildren was profound. He was never boastful, but simply proud to know them and watch them grow and mature. After his retirement from Cornell University in 1997, Emil did not look back. Instead he focused his energies on trips with his wife Ev, visiting his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren and the great natural wonders of the United States. Emil was a graceful man with a well- proportioned body that served him well for many of his passions like fly fishing and jitterbug dancing. He always moved with a characteristic economy of motion.

Anyone who knew Emil knows how much he loved the outdoors. Camping, kayaking, hiking or fishing with family, friends, or by himself, Emil was at peace with the isolation and peace of the woods and waters. Kayaking well into his 70s, he was a wonderfully delightful companion on a lake or trail, but he also enjoyed his time alone with the fish and paddles. Emil introduced a number of his colleagues to canoeing and participated in an annual spring pilgrimage beginning with excursions to the St Lawrence River and morphing into an annual retreat to the Adirondacks – which still continues with a libation to his memory. He was officially designated as the libation selector and wine steward for this annual CU Expats kayaking event. He had excellent taste in wine, bourbon, and scotch.

His love of the outdoors was matched by his love of good literature and good writing. He was often the source of valued recommendations for good books, and he was an excellent critic of academic writing. If one asked him to read over something one had written, an act requiring some courage, one always got back a valuable critique.

Emil is missed and will never be forgotten. Emil left a legacy of care, class, and wit to all who knew him. Emil is survived by his wife of 57 years, Evelyn (Adams), and his four children, Barbara, Deborah, David, and Gregory. He is also survived by his nine grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

John Sipple, Chairperson; David Monk, Kenneth Strike

Lawrence S. Hamilton

June 5, 1925 – October 6, 2016

Born in 1925 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Professor Emeritus Lawrence Stanley Hamilton left a legacy matched by few when he died in Charlotte, Vermont at age 91. After growing up in Canada and serving as a British Royal Navy pilot in WWII (1944-45) he began a career in nature conservation that included studying forestry at the University of Toronto (BS, 1948), NY State College of Forestry (MS, 1950), University of Michigan (Ph.D., 1963), and University of California, Berkeley (Post-Doctoral Studies, 1965). Larry married Helen Halliday in 1947, and they had four children. He served as a Zone Forester in Ontario, Canada until 1951 when he moved to the US to join the faculty in the (then) Department of Conservation as extension forester, assisting private small-scale woodland owners better manage their lands for multiple purposes.

He transitioned to a teaching/research appointment in 1954, became a naturalized US citizen in 1957, and served as director of the department’s Arnot Teaching and Research Forest until 1970. Building on his teaching of forest ecology, Larry developed courses related to ecological analysis, land-use policy and planning, watershed management, and eventually international conservation, which closely reflected his evolving research interests. He was widely respected as an exceptional educator and mentor inspiring countless students to pursue leadership roles in environmental conservation. Representing the feelings of many, former graduate student Peter Willing recently said of Larry: His first question to me when I asked if he would take me on as a graduate student, was “will you step up to the leadership of the local Sierra Club group?” I said yes. Over the 8 years I was at Cornell, he inspired and abetted me in an unabashed advocacy of environmental principles and causes. That inspiration has endured almost 50 years, and has yet to run out.

Larry was a visionary about the need for interdisciplinary, applied scholarship to address the challenges of natural resource management. He led the department in initiating what was then a novel and sometimes contested policy and planning focus reflecting the integration of socioeconomic and ecological sciences for the management of natural and environmental systems. At the time of Larry’s retirement from Cornell, then department chair Harry Everhart noted: This pioneering program in resource management that takes into consideration science, sociology, and economics has helped to maintain our leadership in the solution of many environmental problems. Larry’s legacy is reflected in today’s interdisciplinary applied environmental management focus for the Department of Natural Resources and its Human Dimensions Research Unit, undergraduate major in Environmental and Sustainability Sciences, and the Graduate Field of Natural Resources.

Larry also was a ‘public scholar’ presaging Cornell’s current commitment to engagement and experiential learning. He ran a popular seminar in resource analysis for ecologically based planning for decades where successive classes of Cornell students used the local Fall Creek Watershed as a case study for data collection, analysis, and outreach to communities and local policy and management agencies. Larry, with his tray of 35-mm slides illustrating Fall Creek’s beautiful scenery, multiple ecological features, various uses, and potential problems, was a popular speaker at formal and informal community gatherings across the region. As he developed his knowledge of water resources he involved faculty in a water resources seminar that led to establishing the Water Research Center (now Institute).

Larry was a pioneer in international scholarship in the department, and a role model for students interested in international studies. He initiated a long-term collaboration with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in the early 1970s and was one of the first to document the critical importance of tropical rainforest deforestation and mangrove destruction in Latin America.

Larry was appointed Professor Emeritus upon his retirement from Cornell in September 1980. At that point he married Linda Schenck and moved to Hawaii to begin a 13-year career as a Senior Fellow in the Environment and Policy Institute of the East-West Center. His deep commitment to preserving the world’s environment grew in stature and influence across the international community of conservation scientists and practitioners. He became widely respected as an advocate for protecting tropical cloud forests and ecological corridors; promoting trans-boundary parks and protected areas for both conservation and peace; and understanding the spiritual, cultural, and ecological values of mountain ecosystems. An active member of IUCN’s World Commission on Protected Areas, Larry initiated and led the Mountain Biome theme for almost 25 years. His extraordinary ability to collaborate, communicate, and organize workshops supported efforts of thousands of managers, scientists, and policy makers concerned with sustainable use and protection of the world’s natural resources.

Larry began his version of ‘retirement’ in 1993 when he moved to Charlotte, Vermont. In keeping with his philosophy to “act globally and locally,” he remained involved with IUCN and international mountain conservation, in addition to focusing his attention locally. He and Linda embraced a sustainable rural lifestyle. He was a trustee of The Nature Conservancy Vermont for over 20 years, and shared his expertise and love of nature with the local community through writing, public speaking, and leading many conservation activities. He served as Tree Warden of Charlotte for more than 20 years. A lifelong peace advocate, Larry was active in the Green Mountain Chapter of Veterans for Peace.

Widely appreciated was Larry’s approach to conservation, which took into account both the needs of nature and of her people. IUCN colleagues Adrian Phillips and Graeme Worboys articulated this recently: People loved and admired Larry because they recognized the deep morality that guided his love of nature and his view of the world. He believed in peace unto nature, and peace among humanity. Linda confirms that: He was known as a spirited guy with a bright twinkle in his blue eyes and a readiness to share hugs with both people and trees. We had the joy of knowing Larry since the mid-1970s and fully agree with the superlatives commonly used to describe him: passionate, energetic, approachable, contagious enthusiasm for helping others understand the natural world, lovable curmudgeon, infectious collegiality, youthful energy and love of life, boundless curiosity, person of solid integrity, wise counselor, champion of conservation, and marvelous friend. Little wonder that one of his affectionate nicknames was Lorenzo el Magnífico.

In addition to surviving in the memories of innumerable students, colleagues, friends, and family members, the fruits of Larry’s work are seen in natural areas worldwide as living legacies available to countless people whose lives benefit from his many accomplishments. His written legacy includes over 400 published articles, reports and books covering topics from woodlot management in New York to the protection of tropical and mountainous ecosystems worldwide. In 1992 Larry created, and edited until 2015, the quarterly newsletter Mountain Protected Areas UPDATE, widely read by managers and researchers in more than 55 countries. Some of his professional career achievements have been recognized by numerous honors and awards, including: two Fulbright-Hayes Fellowships (Australia [1969-70] and New Zealand (1978]); the New York State Conservation Council’s Forest Conservationist of the Year award (1969); the Environmental Achiever Award from Friends of UNEP (1987); the Sierra Club’s Raymond E. Sherman Award (1990) the Packard International Parks Merit Award (2003); the University of Hawaii Distinguished Scientist Award for work on Cloud Forest Conservation (2004); the prestigious (Belgian) King Albert Gold Medal for Mountain Conservation Leadership (2004); Honorary IUCN Membership (2008); and his heartfelt favorite, the recent designation of the Hamilton Trail in Vermont TNC’s Williams Woods Nature Preserve in Charlotte.

Larry was proud of his Irish heritage and the extended Hamilton Clan that included family in Canada and the US. An honor that especially pleased him was the family’s 2005 "Grandpa Larry" medallion ("Archdruid of the Hamilton Clan, Defender of Sacred Mountains and Tennis Player Extraordinaire") At the August 2017 family wake for him Linda announced that she had been able to complete an important project for Larry, the book Fences in the Landscape Talk, Are We Listening? A whimsical photographic essay. It draws from hundreds of photos of fences taken by Larry all over the world 1948-2016, a subject that held his curiosity all those years. The book encourages people to observe the landscape and reflect on the stories that fences can tell about that landscape, its natural resources, and the people who built the fences, and also to remember that all fences are impermanent. It is a product of his life-long enthusiasm for learning and understanding. Linda wrote: This book is a testament to his curiosity and good cheer, the love in his heart, plans in his head, and mud on his boots.

In addition to Linda, his professional and life partner of 36 years, Larry is survived by children Bruce (Joan Hamilton), Anne (Doug Johnson), Lynne (Howard Silverberg); daughter-in-law Beth Sachs (Blair, deceased); grandchildren Kate Hamilton (Daniel de la Vega), Patrick Hamilton (Violet Lehrer); Kelsey and Sam Johnson; Joshua and Elena Silverberg; Ben Sachs-Hamilton; great-grandchild Amelia de la Vega; first wife Helen; brother Earl; and several nieces and nephews. Written by James P. Lassoie and Daniel J. Decker

John S. Harding

March 8, 1919 – June 25, 2013

Professor Emeritus John Snodgrass Harding taught in the Department of Human Development, in its previous identity as “Child Development and Family Relations,” from 1953 to 1989, after graduating with a B.A. summa cum laude from the University of Minnesota and then completing both an M.S. and Ph.D. in psychology at Harvard University. Professor Harding, a social psychologist, was an acknowledged scholar in the area of prejudice and social relations. His work was distinguished from the rest of the field at that time by his emphasis on examining how cognitive factors and judgment influence the formation and expression of attitudes and behavior toward others. He authored chapters describing his approach in the first and second Handbooks of Social Psychology, work which anticipated the development of judgment decision-making and social cognition perspectives, which dominate the field of social psychology today. His work revolutionized the field of personality studies by showing how stereotypes could provide a cognitive bias in reasoning.

Consistent with his work on prejudice and discrimination, Professor Harding had a life long interest in policy and applied psychology. He edited the Journal of Social Issues from 1956-1959, an interdisciplinary journal concentrating on applications of social psychological theory to addressing social problems such as prejudice and discrimination, addictions and mental illness, and health disparities. He was one of the first American social psychologists to publish a comparative study of how symptoms of mental health and illness may vary across cultures. In the 1980s he developed an interest in the growing field of gerontology. In 1981, he wrote a proposal arguing for the establishment of a department of policy analysis in the College of Human Ecology (a change which eventually came to fruition).

One of his last visits to the College was as an invited guest for the dedication of the Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research.

John Harding had a prodigious memory, and it was something that he put to good use. He was always ready to retrieve information about previously published research if it would help a colleague. He was also able to complete superb reviews of a colleague’s research by relying on his extraordinary memory to situate the research in a broader historical context and contrast it to, and compare it with, the research of others in the field. John’s memory was something that colleagues teased him about. It was also something that he himself made self-deprecating and good-natured comments about, comments that were typically followed by a robust and almost explosive laugh. He long served as the department’s unofficial historian. John was always eager to help out younger colleagues, not just by serving as a sounding board for their ideas, but also by supporting them with kind words and the sort of broader perspective that only experience can provide. He was, in addition, always the consummate gentleman, making only positive comments about colleagues themselves, even when being sharply critical of their work.

A substantial collection of Professor Harding’s papers and correspondence can be found in Cornell’s Rare and Manuscript Collection.

Barbara Lust, Elaine Wethington and Barbara Koslowski

Richard G. Harrison

November 19, 1945 – April 12, 2016

Dr. Richard G. Harrison, or Rick as colleagues and friends knew him, was born in Baltimore, Maryland on November 19, 1945. His parents, Helen and Harold Harrison, were scientists at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and his father, a physician, served as Chief of Pediatrics at Baltimore City Hospital for over 35 years. Rick had one sibling, older brother Steve, who also pursued an academic research career and is a gifted mentor and professor at Harvard Medical School and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Rick was an undergraduate at Harvard, where he met Ellen Zucker through his classmate, Andy Zucker, her brother. After graduation, Rick spent a year as a Churchill Fellow in Cambridge England before returning to Harvard as a graduate student, but changed to work at the Children’s Cancer Research Institute, which qualified him for an occupational deferment from the military draft. Rick and Ellen married in 1971 shortly before moving to Ithaca, NY for graduate school at Cornell; he earned his Ph.D. in 1977 working with Peter Brussard in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, with a thesis titled “Patterns of variation and genetic differentiation in closely related species: the field crickets of eastern North America”). During their time in Ithaca, Ellen earned her Masters Degree in geological science. Twin daughters, Rebekah and Melissa, were born in 1976 and a year later the family moved to New Haven, CT, where Rick had accepted a position as Assistant Professor at Yale. After a very successful decade at Yale, he was lured back to Cornell in 1986, where he remained on the faculty until his untimely death. Ellen engaged in her environmental interests both at Cornell and in the community.

Rick was a true scholar. He aspired to understand how one species became two separate species, and explored in particular the transitionary stage during which diverging organisms continued to hybridize and share at least some genes, thus providing “windows on the evolutionary process” (Harrison 1990 Oxford Surveys of Evolutionary Biology 7:69- 129). Rick was respected by his peers worldwide for his eloquent and thoughtful talks and writing, and for the fact that he never engaged in hype—if he published something, you could believe the results completely, and trust that his interpretation was balanced and objective. This level of intellectual honesty is all too rare, will be sorely missed, and was one reason Rick was chosen as senior editor of the journal Evolution.

He used the closely related, reproductively isolated but hybridizing species of field crickets Gryllus pennsylvanicus and G. firmus as his primary research system throughout his career. He continuously brought emerging molecular methodologies to bear on his efforts to document and gain mechanistic understanding of the evolutionary, behavioral and ecological forces that shaped genetic variation within and between species and to identify genetic regions associated with reproductive isolation. Rick had his scientific focus and encouraged his students and postdocs to develop their own, though he certainly encouraged studying common questions in diverse organisms ranging from corn borers to stone crabs, Heliconius butterflies to wood rats, sea squirts to iris. This diversity of organisms and evolutionary questions contributed significantly to the intellectual culture that thrived in his lab and attracted many graduate and postdoctoral students to work with him. This was fed further by Rick’s terrific mentorship style, clear and critical mind, and willingness to confront the complex realities of biological organisms without trying to force results to fit preconceived concepts or models. Rick was also very successful attracting undergraduates into his laboratory, where they received training in cutting-edge research, often leading to Honors theses, and future enrollment in prestigious post-graduate programs in biology and medicine. Steve Bogdanowicz, who ran Rick’s lab for nearly 30 years, contributed greatly to teaching and mentoring students.

Rick’s careful studies of field crickets revealed unexpected geographic and genomic complexity in zones of hybridization, and laid the groundwork for much of the work on hybrid zones in other species, as well as paved the path to his insights into the evolutionary forces shaping patterns of diversification across genomes. Genomic islands of differentiation had been viewed by some to signify the location of genes key to reproductive isolation. True to Rick’s intellectual honesty and critical nature, his last publication was very thoughtful in providing reasoned and insightful caution to such simple interpretations. Yet within those signals are likely the functional variants that contribute to the reproductive isolation of these species in the face of hybridization, results sadly he will not see himself.

As an advisor, Rick had an open door policy. And since his door was always open, students as well as colleagues would stop by to talk and to seek his insights or advice. He said that there were a lot of things that we “could” do as scientists, but the hard part was determining what we “should” do. Through his keen mind and especially his generosity, he helped his many academic progeny to sift through ideas and questions to get to the ones that they should and “must” address in their research.

Rick Harrison was recognized for his long and distinguished service as an inspirational teacher with the Harry T. Stinson Award for Outstanding Service to Undergraduates at Cornell in 2013 and the CALS Edgerton Career Award in 2015. Rick began his academic career teaching evolution at Yale for a decade before moving to Cornell in 1986 where he assumed teaching a course in Evolution that was required of Biology majors concentrating in Ecology and Evolution and had an enrollment of approximately 60-70 students, with three lectures per week, plus weekly discussion sections and was taught once a year. A few years later, the Division of Biology voted to make the course a requirement of all Biology majors, regardless of concentration. This lead to a jump in course enrollment to 150-200 to now 300 per semester. While many faculty members shy away from teaching large introductory courses, because of the administrative burdens and the difficulty in getting to know students well, Rick has always stepped forward to participate. He was committed to these courses (and the students!) because he firmly believed that an understanding of evolutionary biology is essential to every biologist's training. He was responsible for bringing in an intensive writing component to the majors course. There is always a temptation in large courses to make lectures into performance pieces, and often, in the process, make instruction less rigorous. Rick was always more measured in this delivery, but was nevertheless thoroughly engaging because of his obvious intellect, humor, and respect for the audience. Students respected Rick tremendously and learned a great deal from his engaging, thoughtful, and well-organized lectures. He taught this course through several curriculum changes until 2011.

In 2011, Rick moved from the biology majors’ course in Evolutionary Biology to the non-majors’ course on Evolution because of his desire to show a broad range of students the importance of evolutionary principles in all aspects of science and daily affairs. This is an extremely important course for the science distribution requirement of non-majors, and the fact that Rick took this on demonstrates his dedication to the importance of a liberal arts education. Rick also initiated a new upper-level course on “Speciation: Genetics, Ecology and Behavior” which he co-taught with Dr. Kerry Shaw for several years. Rick added this course to the curriculum because upper-level course offerings in evolutionary biology were slim and because Speciation is a fundamental component of evolution. The course was very popular with upperlevel undergraduates and beginning graduate students from multiple departments.

In a course on grant writing for graduate students, Rick was both insightful in his criticism and always encouraging in his constructive suggestions. Through his dedicated and thoughtful advising, Rick trained and launched the careers of many successful students, from undergraduates to postdocs, who are now spread throughout academia in the US and abroad.

From 1996-2001 and 2006-2009, Rick served as Department Chair in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Rick distinguished himself by always holding the interests of the whole department to heart. He recognized that the department’s strength lay in the breadth of research areas encompassed by its faculty, and he sought to strengthen them all. During his tenure he was instrumental in recruiting five new faculty members to the department, in areas ranging from mathematical ecology to molecular developmental biology. Rick was also a good ambassador and link to the many other evolutionary biologists across campus.

Rick was recognized for his contributions to scholarship in evolutionary biology by being elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1998. He contributed invaluable service as Editor on many scholarly publications, including as Editor in Chief for Evolution, and as member of the Editorial Boards of Genetics, Molecular Biology and Evolution, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics and American Scientist.

Rick’s family played a very important part in his life, a mindset he sought to instill in his students and colleagues, as well as his daughters. He loved the outdoors, stargazing, good cooking, wine and good friends (often together), and, together with his wife, was a passionate and accomplished gardener. Rick was also an avid runner for 40 years, and valued his friends and fellow pavement pounders in the High Noon runners club at Cornell and which shaped his calendar on many days as his noon runs were a priority for him. It was this active life and exercise routine that made his untimely death even more unbelievable to his friends and colleagues.

As important as his scientific contributions were, so were his contributions to students and many colleagues through his mentorship. Rick was a passionate teacher, even of his twin daughters growing up. He always appreciated and valued the individual, and had a knack for bringing out the best in his advisees and mentees. To say he is beloved by his current and former students is an understatement. And it is fair to say that we, his colleagues and friends, felt the same way about him. Sadly, Rick died suddenly and unexpectedly on April 12, 2016 at age 70 while snorkeling with Ellen on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. In many ways, he passed away at the peak of his scientific career, and at a time when he seemed genuinely happy and enthusiastic to pursue writing a major new book on Speciation. We have so many wonderful memories of Rick. What is terribly sad is that we will no longer benefit from new scientific, professional and personal insights from Rick, but we will always cherish our wonderful memories of our past scientific and academic discussions, debates and simply casual conversations with Rick. We are all better scientists, teachers, people, and advisors for having known Rick.

He is survived by his wife Ellen, their twin daughters, Rebekah who is an emergency physician with Kaiser Permanente (residing in Lincoln, CA with husband Jeff and daughter Serafina) and Melissa who is an assistant professor in the Department of Biomolecular Chemistry at the University of WI (residing in Madison, WI with husband Andrew Mehle and son Ryder), and by his older brother Steve of Boston, MA.

Charles “Chip” Aquadro, chair; Harry Greene and Monica Geber

Martin B. Harrison

December 8, 1924 – September 11, 2008

Professor Emeritus Martin B. Harrison, known as Marty to his colleagues and friends, was a plant pathologist with special expertise in plant nematology. He was among the first American scientists to address the threat posed by a potato cyst nematode called the golden nematode in North America. This nematode had been found in potato fields on Long Island, New York, and it had the potential to spread and destroy the economic viability of the potato-growing industry of the state and nation.

Marty was born in Brooklyn, New York, and attended public schools of New York City. Three years of military service followed his graduation from high school in 1943. In 1946, Marty enrolled in Cornell University's College of Agriculture. He received the B.S. degree in 1950, then moved to Manhattan, Kansas, for graduate study in botany and plant pathology at Kansas State College of Agriculture and Applied Science (now Kansas State University). He received the M.S. degree in 1951 and then returned to Cornell for a doctoral program in plant pathology and nematology under the guidance of Professor William Mai. His Ph.D. dissertation, completed in 1955, dealt with environmental factors affecting the control of nematodes by soil fumigation, with special reference to the golden nematode.

Marty joined the faculty of Cornell's Department of Plant Pathology as an assistant professor in 1955. He was based at the Cornell University-USDA Ornamentals Laboratory at Farmingdale, Long Island, and conducted research on the golden nematode at the nearby Nematode Research Laboratory at Seaford. He was promoted to the rank of associate professor in 1960, transferred to the Ithaca campus in 1976, and was awarded the title Professor Emeritus upon his retirement in 1988.

In collaboration with other scientists, Dr. Harrison investigated sources and inheritance of resistance to the golden nematode in Solanum species, studied the role of host resistance in population dynamics and management of the pest, and participated in development of resistant potato varieties. He also studied resistance-breaking biotypes and egg-hatching factors of potato cyst nematodes, their survival in absence of host plants, and methods of control by soil fumigation and application of systemic nematicides.

Marty’s research, after moving to Ithaca, was focused on population studies of nematode pathogens of fruit trees, grapevines, and turfgrasses. Nematodes capable of transmitting viruses to apple and stone-fruit trees received particular attention. Marty and colleagues also discovered and identified a previously unknown pathogen of grapevines, Meloiderita species. During his Ithaca years, Marty advised graduate students, taught plant nematology, and conducted extension and diagnostic work in that subject area.

Marty loved sailing, which was a favorite leisure activity during his time on Long Island. Cayuga Lake didn't often present good sailing conditions, but he took to the water at Ithaca when the breeze was up and work permitted. Wine making was another hobby. Marty was also a fan of Cornell lacrosse, hockey, and football. He was always cheerful, caring, and courteous to all of his colleagues and friends.

Marty moved to the San Diego area after retirement. He was a resident of Hacienda Heights, California, at the time of his death.

Written by Wayne A. Sinclair, George S. Abawi and William E. Fry

Editor’s Note: Professor Harrison passed away in 2008. Unfortunately, a memorial statement was not prepared at the time, so we’ve included his tribute in this issue.

Jerome E. Hass

June 1, 1940 – January 21, 2013

Jerome E. Hass (Jerry) was the James B. Rubin Professor of Finance and the Alan Krause Faculty Fellow in Real Estate (as well as other titles) at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University, from 1967 to 2013. He became a Professor Emeritus in 2008, but he continued to teach at Johnson and Cornell until his death in January 2013. Jerry was scheduled to teach a course starting the week that he died; some of his colleagues are continuing that course.

Jerry was born and raised in rural Minnesota. This rural background helped him later as he and his family bought the Ithaca Agway, saving it from bankruptcy. They continue to manage it today. He earned a B.A. degree from St. Mary’s University, Minnesota, an MBA from the Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania) and a Ph.D. degree in economics from Carnegie-Mellon University. When he graduated from Carnegie, it was one of the leading graduate business schools in the world, and at the forefront of changes in business research and teaching. Jerry could have started his career at many great schools. He and his wife Joan (Jo) chose Cornell. They never expressed regret. At Cornell, Jerry taught corporate and managerial finance, real estate finance, security analysis, investment analysis, energy economics, and business strategy. He never refused a Dean’s request that he pinch hit to fill an unplanned gap in the School’s teaching schedule. He also taught extensively in the School’s executive development programs and was the lead faculty member in the initiation and success of the School’s executive MBA programs. He taught in many countries, including Austria, Australia, Belgium, Russia, Slovakia, Switzerland, Turkey and Ukraine.

Jerry was active throughout his career in business consulting and government service. He served as the Chief of the Division of Economic Studies at the Federal Power Commission during an 18- month leave from Cornell, and as Special Assistant to James Schlesinger at the Executive Office of the President. He was an expert in the energy industry, and he was a special advisor to the Secretary of Energy. Jerry worked as a consultant for several firms including National Economic research Associates and Charles River Associates.

Jerry was a frequent expert witness on economic and financial issues. He also consulted and developed executive education courses in financial analysis and served for many years on the board of directors of Selected Funds, part of the very successful Davis family of investment funds. He testified more than fifty times in state and federal regulatory hearings as well as before both houses of Congress (U.S.). He worked on the costs of pharmaceutical products, the capital structure of oil and CO2 pipelines, electric utility regulation, the valuation of closely-held stock, and in many other areas.

Jerry was a co-author of two books, Financing the Energy Industry and An Introduction to Managerial Finance. He was the author or a co- author of many articles in leading finance and public policy journals. Many of his analyses and testimony have been published.

But most Cornell professors have comparable records. Why was Jerry a special faculty member? Why will he be so deeply missed by all his family, friends, students, colleagues and alumni? First and foremost, he cared deeply about Cornell, Johnson and his students. He taught over 5,000 appreciative students, now alumni. Then, there was the annual graduation picnic hosted by Jo and Jerry Hass for a few hundred Johnson School staff and graduates and their families and many gala dinners and other events at the Hass farm celebrating some visit or other occasion.

But even more important were the innumerable acts of kindness, generosity and service, to his community and many individuals. For example, he served as the board chair of Catholic Charities, but one did not have to profess belief in a religion to receive assistance. Jerry gave money, and he gave his time. If an organization needed workers and Jerry heard about it, he was there. He was instrumental in building All Saints Church in Lansing, but equally memorable was his putting on a bright yellow chicken suit all day Saturday to help advertise a fund raiser. He served as president of the Lansing Board of Education and on the investment committee for the Franziska Racker Center. He regularly helped many of his neighbors, colleagues and friends with needs great and small.

Jerry Hass is survived by Joan (Jo) Mullenbach Hass, his wife of almost 50 years, five children, Eric Hass (Elizabeth), Christopher Hass (Christine), Gregory Hass (Angi), Neal Hass (Teresa), Marna Boerman (Andy), ten grandchildren, and a large extended family.

Most importantly, Jerry contributed joy and happiness to any group he happened to be with. He sang songs and told stories. He was always kind, thoughtful and considerate. He never uttered a nasty or mean word. He is missed. Let us try to live up to the standards he set.

Thank you Jerry. Harold Bierman, Jr., Chairperson; Maureen O'Hara, L. Joseph Thomas

David Wilson Henderson

February 23 , 1939 – December 20 , 2018

David Henderson passed away on December 20, 2018 in Wilmington, Delaware, after being struck by a vehicle the previous day. He was 79 years old.

David was born in Walla Walla, Washington to Reverend William H. Henderson and Kathleen Wilson Henderson. After several moves in his youth, he graduated from Ames High School in Iowa in 1957. He earned degrees in Physics, Philosophy and Mathematics from Swarthmore College in 1961. David added Mathematics as a late major at the suggestion of a professor who pointed out to him that his true passion was geometry. David’s first mathematics research paper on the geometry of Venn diagrams with more than four classes (an unsolved problem until then) evolved from a college course on the philosophy of logic during his senior year at Swarthmore. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin in 1964 under the direction of R.H. Bing. His thesis, titled “Extensions of Dehn’s Lemma and the loop theorem”, was closely related to his discovery of an error in a widely publicized “proof” of the Poincaré Conjecture, one of the great 20th century problems in geometry, finally solved in the early 2000s. He spent two postdoctoral years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. During this time David produced a notable example in dimension theory - an infinite-dimensional compact metrizable space with the property that every proper closed subset has dimension zero or infinity. In 1965, David solved a famous problem known in the Soviet Union as “Problema Tumarkina” and in Poland as “Problem Mazurkiewicza” – he constructed an example of an infinite-dimensional continuum (compact connected metric space) with no positive-dimensional sub-continua (or sub-compacta). He was asked to present this result in a special session of the 1966 International Congress of Mathematicians in Moscow.

In fall of 1966, David Henderson joined the Cornell Math Department. Here he became interested in infinite-dimensional topology as it relates to analysis and shifted his focus to infinitedimensional vector spaces and the manifolds modeled on them. David published 37 research papers and the books Differential Geometry, a Geometric Introduction and Experiencing Geometry – Euclidean and Non-Euclidean with history (3rd edition with Daina Taimina). At the time of his death he was working on 4th edition. David had typeset all his and Daina’s books, something he really enjoyed doing. David retired from Cornell in 2012 after teaching here 46 years.

In the 1970s, David’s interests turned to Math Education. He joined the field of Graduate Education and over the next four decades he played a central role in supervising some 40 theses. He also directed the Teacher Education program for secondary school teachers. His steadfast efforts in this area over the decades were recognized by Ithaca High School Math teachers who placed a plaque in the Math Department with David’s photo and the inscription “The IHS Math Department honors the memory of Cornell Professor David Henderson. He inspired us and influenced what we teach and how we teach it. We are deeply grateful.”

With Leonard Silver he started a Calculus sequence with exam tutorials in which students worked at their own pace and took exams when they felt they were ready. While this experiment was shortlived, it resulted in the creation of the Math Support Center (MSC) in 1979. The MSC, staffed by undergraduate tutors, is a place where students can drop in to get assistance in basic math classes. It continues to function today and is a very popular. Over the years, David developed many courses, the calculus tutorial class, courses aimed at math majors, some at students interested in Math Education, and some at those in the Biological and Social Sciences. He also developed Math Explorations, a course accessible to all students. David thought geometrically, often bringing visual aids to class such as a globe or surface of negative curvature. He continued his work in Math Education (or as he called it, Educational Mathematics) well into his retirement, often speaking at and organizing conferences.

In 2005, he accepted an invitation to join the core curriculum development team of the Algebra Project. This initiative helps ensure that all students learn the mathematics they need to enter college and not require remedial courses. In 2011, David joined a project to develop and research coherent curricula for K-5 mathematics and science. He wrote the geometry curriculum for this project. In 2016, he joined a research project “Function Learning Progressions,” affiliated with both the Algebra Project and the nonprofit Educational Testing Service.

David took his mission of education to far flung places, taking extended visits to Moscow and Warsaw in the 1970s, Birzeit University in Palestine in 1980 and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem where he organized joint seminars for Jewish and Palestinian mathematicians. In 1995, one year after the first free elections, he gave multiple workshops at mathematical meetings across South Africa. He participated in two International Commission of Mathematics Instruction Studies in 1995 (Italy) and 1998 (Singapore). In 2000, he was a Fulbright Scholar in the University of Latvia in Riga, Latvia, and visited Tartu University, Estonia.

Since his childhood, David loved nature and tried to be outdoors as much as he could. His children fondly remember family camping trips and long car trips across United States and in Europe. David had excellent carpentry skills, he loved building things himself and always had some ongoing project at home. He loved music, playing piano and travel. Despite physical limitations due to his health, he travelled to Brazil and to Latvia at the age of 79 and was planning a trip to Morocco in 2019. He is survived by his siblings William (Bill) Henderson, Stephen Henderson and Marjorie Ogilvie; his wife Daina Taimina, his children Keith Henderson, Rebecca Wynne, Lelde Taimina-Tzou and Linda Taimina and four grandchildren Lisa (Linden) and Abigail Henderson, Erin and Liam Wynne.

Written by Ravi Ramakrishna (chair), Robert Connelly, Peter Kahn, and Daina Taimina

Christopher L. Henley

September 24, 1955 – June 29, 2015

Christopher L. Henley died June 29, 2015 in Ithaca after a year's struggle with brain cancer. He was 59 years old. He was a Professor of Physics, working in theoretical condensed matter physics in the Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics. His mind remained clear and he remained scientifically active almost to the end.

Chris had a gift for mathematics, winning in the Putnam competition while an undergraduate at Caltech. He seemed to be headed for a career in mathematics when, after graduating in 1977, he studied functional equations at Silesian University in Katowice, Poland. However, memories of Richard Feynman's Physics-X lectures at Caltech in the end proved decisive, and Chris entered the Harvard Physics graduate program the following year. At Harvard he worked under Bertrand Halperin, writing a thesis on the low temperature properties of vector spin glasses.

During his two postdocs (1983-1987), at Bell Labs and then at Cornell, Chris took up the scientific challenge that would define the first half of his career. Quasicrystals were discovered in 1984, turning crystallographic orthodoxy on its head. Choosing not to devote his prodigious mathematical skills to the finer points of the quasicrystal formalism, Chris instead dove headlong into the problem of unraveling these novel structures at an atomic level of detail. This meant sifting through dozens of known crystal structures of similar composition, with the hope of discovering shared structural principles that might flesh out the "tile" shapes that served as cartoons of the novel form of order. This intense period of library research payed off, when Chris observed that the quasicrystal structure could be systematically approximated by a series of ever larger unit cell crystals, and identified with known structures in much the same way that the golden mean is approximated by ever larger ratios of Fibonacci numbers (1/1, 2/1, 3/2, 5/3, etc.). The known crystal structures led Chris to the first proposals for the atomic structures of quasicrystals.

Although other topics in condensed matter and statistical physics made increasing demands on his time in subsequent years, Chris never turned his back on important quasicrystal questions that remained unresolved, even when the popularity of the subject diminished. The most notable of these is the stabilizing mechanism: is it the configurational entropy of tile-rearrangement degrees of freedom, or the energetics of "tile matching rules" and how these are implemented by actual atoms. He was named a Fellow of the American Physics Society in 1996 for "theoretical contributions to the understanding of the structure and physics of quasicrystals and related crystalline structures."

The role of geometry is a common theme in Chris' research, not just on quasicrystals but also on magnetic systems and biology. He understood that there would always be problems that could not be reduced to spherical cows, and felt he was uniquely qualified to take charge in those situations. Examples include his discovery of semi-classical interference effects associated with "weathervane modes" of spins in kagome magnets, and his models of retro-virus capsid self- assembly. Chris' geometrical toolbox was immense, and a rich source of metaphor, as his students grew to appreciate.

Old-fashioned in his ways (he never owned a laptop or cell phone), Chris throughout his life tried to preserve the tradition of informal face-to-face discussion at a blackboard, and plain-talk when expressing ideas. To his students he was somebody who could be counted on for help at odd hours and weekends. Many of these students went on to distinguished careers in physics.

Chris was a deeply ethical man, and combined a disarming honesty with a sharp wit. He was quiet about his private life. It is known that reading the Harry Potter series was among his few indulgences. He was always fond of puns. In drafts of his textbook, he composed Haiku to the beginnings of each chapter. To introduce the origins of superconductivity, Chris wrote: Casimir's marvel A mile of dirty lead wire -- Perfect transmission

And, to illuminate the subtle concept of electron spin, Their moments are just Distractions; the electrons Simply feel twoness

During his therapy when his hair became sparse, he wore his beret with a rakish humor.

Christopher Henley devoted his life to physics. He worked heroically on his courses, inventing more and more new ideas about how to teach, and seemingly bringing a newly rewritten chapter of his book to every class. He kept the Physics Department's condensed-matter theory group on track, and fiercely defended the summer pizza presentations for theory graduate students. An outstanding intellect, he felt a deep responsibility to do the best possible science. He pushed himself days and evenings to deliver his best to his students, to Cornell, and to the scientific enterprise.

Chris lived spartanly, donating generously to charities that supported the environment and fought disease and poverty. He ran, swam, and bicycled in the Ithaca countryside.

Chris is survived by his mother, Nancy, and a son, Christopher King. He will be very much missed by them, and by his many academic colleagues at Cornell and around the world. Veit Elser, chair; Jim Sethna, N. David Mermin

Leon A. Heppel October 20, 1912 – April 9, 2010

Dr. Leon Heppel came to Cornell in 1967 as a Professor in the new Section of Biochemistry after a distinguished career at the NIH, which ended when he retired from the NIH Public Health Service. In 1958, Dr. Heppel had been appointed chief of the Laboratory of Biochemistry and Metabolism, National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases and he held that position until he left NIH. At Cornell, Dr. Heppel was an important figure, along with Dr. Quentin Gibson and Dr. Efraim Racker, in transforming Biochemistry at Cornell University from a small department in the College of Agriculture into a major university program with greatly increased visibility. Leon’s well-deserved election to the National Academy in 1970 made an important contribution to this visibility increase. Even though Leon came to Cornell as a tenured professor, he set an example for all department members with his long hours in the laboratory and his enthusiasm for science. Dr. Heppel, although a quiet person, was quite outgoing and interacted with many people at Cornell. He enjoyed the outdoors and took regular walks with small groups of colleagues around the campus and the plantations. He also was very interested in art and he regularly asked people to name the artist of his current favorite picture.

Dr. Heppel had a very impressive research career that started with early studies of potassium nutrition in rats as a graduate student at Berkeley in the late 1930s. He then went to The University of Rochester Medical School where he showed that muscle cells were permeable to sodium and potassium ions, a seminal observation that changed membrane physiology. After obtaining his M.D., Leon joined the Public Health Service at the NIH where he carried out toxicological studies during the war. Then in 1948 he joined the new enzyme research section headed by Dr. Arthur Kornberg and began his study of enzymes involved in nucleic acid metabolism. 1 He became a major figure in this field and interacted with many other enzymologists both as a mentor and as a collaborator. He was a co-chairman of the first Nucleic Acids Gordon Conference in 1962. He helped in identifying a key regulatory molecule, cyclic AMP and the use of his library of synthetic oligonucleotides led to determining the genetic code for which Dr. Nirenberg won a Nobel Prize.

In his study of E. coli ribonuclease, he discovered that this enzyme was not a ribosomal protein as had been reported but it was in a previously unrecognized compartment, the periplasmic space that is between the inner and outer membranes. He developed a procedure, osmotic shock, which specifically released periplasmic proteins. This led to the discovery of a set of small molecule binding proteins which are present in this space, that are required for a class of ATP- dependent transport systems (ABC transporters). He started to study the mechanism of these transport systems and continued this research at Cornell. One of his students, Ed Berger, provided clear evidence that ABC transport systems used ATP as the energy source to drive active transport, while so called membrane bound systems used the proton motive force. Later Dr. Heppel carried out detailed biochemical studies of the E. coli ATPase F1 that inter-converts the proton motive force and ATP and which is responsible for ATP synthesis. At the end of his career, Dr. Heppel studied the role of extracellular ATP in eukaryotic cells with 23 papers on this topic. Dr. Heppel trained many students and postdoctoral fellows during his career and many of them became successful scientists.

Over his many years at Cornell, Leon was a key member of the section both in his research and as a warm human being and his passing was a major loss. David Wilson, Chairperson; Peter Hinkle, Ken Kemphues

George P. Hess

November 18, 1924 – September 9, 2015

George Hess, Ph.D., joined the Cornell faculty in 1955 and served for 60 years. His research focused on the mechanisms of proteins investigated using fast reaction techniques, some of which he developed. Initially, he investigated proteins in solution, including alphachymotrypsin, lysozyme, and cytochrome c. He then turned to the structure and function of membrane-bound proteins, particularly neurotransmitter receptors that facilitate communication between the cells of the nervous system. Malfunction of these receptors is the key to many neurological diseases, and the proteins are the targets of many clinical therapies as well as abused drugs. Rapid reaction techniques to examine receptor proteins embedded in a cell membrane were not available prior to his work.

Under his leadership, George Hess’ group developed new techniques and chemical probes to study the receptors in single cells on submillisecond time scales. The innovative approach included a laser-pulse photolysis method that allows researchers to measure rate constants for individual steps in the mechanism of action of the receptor. For this accomplishment, his group also developed compounds (“caged” neurotransmitters) that can be equilibrated with the receptors but remain biologically inactive until photolyzed to release the neurotransmitter very rapidly. In this way, the delay due to the time needed for the reactants to reach an initial equilibrium was overcome. He combined this method with electrophysiological techniques developed in other laboratories. Using the new approaches, the group has illuminated how mechanisms of receptors are affected by therapeutic and abused drugs, or by epilepsylinked mutations, and they have worked to identify compounds that alleviate the receptor malfunction.

“George Hess was a pioneer in the study of a class of proteins called ion channels, gate-keepers that allow specific small molecules to enter cells,” said colleague Volker Vogt, Cornell professor of molecular biology and genetics. “His studies combined chemical and biological approaches to provide an unprecedented mechanistic understanding of this process, which is the basis of the action of nerves.”

“George had a mind and a physical constitution that could not be ignored,” added Barbara Baird, senior associate dean in the College of Arts & Sciences and professor of chemistry and chemical biology. “Whether in scientific discussions or the great outdoors, a strenuous hike for others was an enjoyable walk in the woods for him. I and many others will miss his invigorating friendship.”

Professor Hess was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of the Biophysics Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Microbiology. He was a John S. Guggenheim fellow, a Fulbright senior research scholar, a special fellow at the National Institutes of Health, a Fogarty scholar and a recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Award.

George Hess was well known for his mentoring of undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students, and he twice received Outstanding Educator Recognition by Merrill Presidential Scholars.

“George had such a tremendous impact in science, and in my own scientific journey,” said colleague Linda Nicholson, professor of molecular biology and genetics. “He was so generous in spirit, and would regularly drop by my office to say hello and to discuss science and life. His visits were often filled with stories of his own journey, from his boyhood in Austria and California, to his various adventures as he grew from a young scientist into a world-renowned member of the National Academy of Sciences.”

George Hess was also a visiting fellow and visiting professor at many universities around the world during his career. He served twice as a U.S. Department of State cultural exchange professor in Europe; he was on the advisory board of the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience in Puerto Rico. He served on numerous review panels and the Editorial Advisory Board of Biochemistry.

Dr. Hess received his bachelor’s degree, and then his doctoral degree in biochemistry in 1951, both from the University of California, Berkeley, followed by postdoctoral training in chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At Berkeley with C. H. Li, he showed that the adrenocorticotropic hormone (corticotropin), thought to be a protein, is actually a small peptide. At MIT in John Sheehan’s laboratory, he developed the dicyclohexylcarbodiimide method for the formation of peptide bonds.

In 2012, the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics hosted an academic seminar to celebrate his work and career.

“I greatly admired the scientific partnership between George and his wife, Susan,” said Eric Alani, professor and chair of the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics. “This interaction, in addition to the beautiful science that it led to, provided us with a wonderful example of the importance of collaboration in all aspects of one’s life.”

George Hess was born in Vienna, Austria to the late Henry and Edith Mueller Hess, and came to the United States in 1938. He served in the United States Army from 1944 to 1946. George Hess is survived by his wife of 35 years, Susan Coombs ’80; four sons by his second wife Betsy Williams, Peter ’79, Richard, Paul, and David, and daughters-in-law Natalie Mahowald, Chris Colbath-Hess, Katherine Childs, and Andrea Kahn; and his eight grandchildren, Gabriel, Noah, Jacob, Alan, Sophie, Elias, Rowan, and Lyndon. In addition to his parents, he was also predeceased by his daughter, Alvis Wieder, and his first wife, Jean Ray. Peter Hess ’79 is a professor of biological and environmental engineering at Cornell, and Natalie Mahowald is a Cornell professor of earth and atmospheric sciences.

Eric Alani, chair Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics. This statement was slightly modified from an article written by Cornell Chronicle writer Krishna Ramanujan (Cornell Chronicle article appeared on 9/21/15) in collaboration with Linda Glaser, College of Arts and Sciences.

Peter C. Hinkle

November 13, 1940 – May 12, 2017

Peter C. Hinkle (76) died on Friday, May 12, 2017, in Ithaca, NY. Born in Keene, NH, into the musical family of Norwood and Cornelia Hinkle, he spent the first part of his life at The Putney School, VT, where Norwood was the musical director and Cornelia taught piano. He, too, learned to play a musical instrument, the cello. At The Putney School he sang in the chorus and in madrigals, competed in ski jumping and cross-country skiing, but most of all, he was fascinated by all things scientific. After graduation from The Putney School in 1958, he was accepted at Harvard University, where he earned a B.S. in Biochemistry in 1962.

After a summer of bicycling around Europe, he entered the Graduate School at New York University, to work toward a Ph.D. in the laboratory of Professor Efraim Racker at the Public Health Research Institute (PHRI) and New York University. There he first worked on the topic that would form part of his scientific work - oxidative phosphorylation and the energy metabolism of the cell. He became especially excited by the new chemiosmotic hypothesis of Peter D. Mitchell in England. After he received his Ph.D. in 1967, he went to work with Dr. Mitchell on a post-doctoral NIH Fellowship.

Working with Mitchell in England was a unique experience that Peter loved to tell: it was carried out in a mansion that Mitchell owned, the Glynn House, and converted for biochemical research. Mitchell and his assistant Jennifer Moyle founded a charitable organization dedicated to biochemical research and chemiosmotic reactions. Mitchell would later win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1978) for his development of the chemiosmotic hypothesis, to which Peter made important contributions.

Peter joined the Section of Biochemistry, Molecular and Cell Biology (BMCB), in the Section of Biological Sciences at Cornell University in 1969 first as a postdoctoral fellow and in 1973 as an Assistant Professor. He moved up the ranks and served as Chair of BMCB from 1985-1988. During his 44 years of tenure at the University he mentored many undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students.

At Cornell, Peter was part of a group that included Racker, Richard McCarty (former Chair of BMCB), and Andre Jagendorf, that made Cornell the world’s leader in elucidating the mechanisms of ATP synthesis. Peter made key contributions to understanding how many electrons (from oxygen) are moved through the electron transport chain to make one ATP molecule (the so-called P/O ratio). A significant contribution to the acceptance of the chemiosmotic theory of ATP production was a seminal review article in Scientific American, “How Cells Make ATP”, co-written with McCarty. Peter’s wife, Maija, also made important contributions to the illustrations in that article.

Besides oxidative phosphorylation and P/O ratios, Peter studied membrane transport and glucose transport. As McCarty wrote, “His lab was the first to show that membranes of animal cells contain an embedded protein that mediates the transport of glucose across membranes”.

In the later years, he enjoyed teaching the auto-tutorial introductory biochemistry course, as well as a course in scientific ethics. Peter must have taught biochemistry to literally thousands of Cornell undergrads. He retired in 2014 and was awarded the title of Professor Emeritus. In retirement, he was starting to work on electronic music, incorporating bird songs into his compositions.

Peter is survived by his devoted wife of 51 years, Maija, née Veinbergs; three accomplished sons: Christopher, Paul (Christine Costello), and Benjamin (Ann Walker); four beloved granddaughters: Lillian (Lilly) Jean Hinkle, Kaiva Alexandra Hinkle, Lara Michelle Hinkle and Julia Saffron Hinkle; two brothers: David Currier Hinkle (Patricia Mills), and Steven Currier Hinkle (Margie Bowles), and many nieces and nephews.

Written by Bill Brown, Richard McCarty and Maija Hinkle

Harold F. Hintz

October 28, 1937 – April 8, 2016

Harold "Skip" Hintz was born and raised in Frank, OH and proud to have worked on the family’s livestock farm. Skip attended The Ohio State University, earning a BS in Animal Science, and then Cornell University, where he earned MS and Ph.D. degrees in Animal Nutrition. From 1964 to 1967, he was an Assistant Professor of Animal Science (swine nutrition) at the University of California, Davis. In 1967, he joined the equine research program at Cornell, a joint program of the College of Veterinary Medicine and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. As a member of the Cornell faculty, he rose through the ranks to Professor of Animal Nutrition from 1979-2005 and served as Chairman of the Animal Science Department from 1991-1997. When he retired in 2005, he was named Professor Emeritus.

Dr. Hintz had a distinguished research career and was considered a preeminent international expert on equine nutrition. He authored almost 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers, mostly on horse nutrition with emphasis on mineral and energy metabolism and their relationship to performance and health. He worked with a team to find solutions to several important equine bone and metabolic problems and his group conducted many draft horse and pony experiments using the large treadmill available in the College of Veterinary Medicine. Dr. Hintz also made significant contributions to the nutrition and metabolism of companion and exotic animals. Dr. Hintz published 36 book chapters, was co-author of four text books, and had written a prodigious 625 technical bulletins and proceedings papers.

Among Dr. Hintz’ numerous recognitions and service were: induction into the Equine Research Hall of Fame; president of the American Academy of Veterinary Nutrition; president of the Equine Nutrition Physiology Society; a member of the American Association of Equine Sports Medicine Board of Directors; the 1991 Amoco Faculty Award for Teaching; and being inducted as a member of The Ohio State University Hall of Fame. He was a chair of the Committee on Animal Nutrition of the National Research Council (NRC), the NRC Subcommittee on the Nutrient Requirements of the Horse, and the Organizing Committee for the International Conference on Equine Exercise Physiology.

Skip is best remembered at Cornell as a teacher and advisor. He had a witty sense of humor and a big, wonderful smile. During his 38year career he taught thousands and advised many hundreds of undergraduates, most of whom regarded him with a mixture of awe and great affection. He developed a reputation for stimulating, wellillustrated lectures of interest to both neophytes and those with years of equine experience. One of his students said: “Dr. Hintz laughed more than anyone I have ever known. He smiled not because he felt he had to, but because he felt he had everything to smile about. His jovial nature kept us more than awake during his two-hour night courses. I won’t remember everything he taught us about Horses or Dog Nutrition, but I will remember those little details eg. the stats on how many dogs choke on a bone each year or the magnitude of equine obesity in America.”

Many students who were not Dr. Hintz’s regularly assigned advisees sought out his counsel as a result of positive in-classroom interactions and especially regarding their interests toward Veterinary School. He won almost every available College of Agriculture and Life Sciences award for teaching and advising, including the Edgerton Career Teaching Award (1997), the CALS Professor of Merit (2000) and the Carpenter Advising Award (2005). He received the Outstanding Faculty Award from the CALS Alumni in 1999. Skip’s uniquely engaging teaching style, unfailing good humor, and ready availability as an advisor and mentor were greatly appreciated. Skip was highly respected by his professorial colleagues as a collegial friend.

On a personal level, Skip took great pride as a member of Alpha Zeta Fraternity and also enjoyed western movies, country music, reading, and birding. In the local community he was a long time active member of Trinity Lutheran Church, where he served as an elder for many years and as a humble and faithful servant of the Lord. Skip and his wife, Sandra Jean Hintz, were married for 57 years, and they have 3 children and 4 grandchildren.

W.R. Butler, M.L. Thonney and D.E. Bauman

Stephen B. Hitchner

February 4, 1916 – January 1, 2011

Stephen Ballinger Hitchner was born in Daretown, New Jersey, where he grew up on a small farm. After high school, Steve elped his father on the farm for three years until 1966, when he enrolled at Rutgers University as a dairy husbandry major. While at Rutgers, he earned part of his keep by looking after a university poultry flock, and he took part-time employment in the laboratory of Dr. F. R. Beaudette, an authority on avian diseases. These were both significant, steering him toward his lifelong career in research on infectious diseases of birds, primarily poultry. Dr. Beaudette encouraged him to enroll in the Veterinary School at the University of Pennsylvania where he earned the VMD degree in 1943.

Graduation coincided with two events: first, he married Mariana White and second, he was inducted in the U.S. Army Veterinary Corps. He served in the military for 3 years, largely on assignment with the Pan American Sanitary Bureau studying animal diseases in Central America and Mexico.

Upon the completion of his tour of duty in the army, he pursued a career in avian pathology. An initial appointment at a new College of Veterinary Medicine in Urbana, IL was short-lived due to the lack of accommodations for his young family (he and Mariana had their first of five children by then), so he accepted an appointment at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, now Virginia Tech, where h made the seminal discovery of the B-1 strain of Newcastle disease virus. This strain was destined to be used world-wide as a vaccine for the control of that disease. What he called a serendip tous discovery opened many doors for his career. He soon was offered an appointment as Full Professor at the University of Massachusetts where he continued to carry out significant research on poultry virus diseases. Then he was recruited to a commercial company, American Scientific Laboratories (ASL), in Madison, WI, where he did full-time research on avian diseases and vaccine development for the next 7 years. During all of this he gained a well-deserved reputation as a “straight shooter,” whose work could be trusted to be first-rate. In 1960, Steve and two colleagues from ASL helped establish a new start-up poultry vaccine company (L&M Laboratory) on Maryland’s eastern shore. This venture was quite successful and within a few years it attracted a purchase by Abbott Laboratories, a large pharmaceutical company.

At the time that Steve moved to Chicago, the Department of Avian Diseases at Cornell’s College of Veterinary Medicine needed to recruit a new Chairman, resulting from Dr. P. Philip Levine’s desire to retire. Given Dr. Hitchner’s reputation as one of the most respected members of the field of avian medicine based on his technical expertise, his honest approach to everything he did, and the productivity and excellence associated with his work, it is not surprising that all of the faculty in the Department put him at the top of the list of desirable replacements for Dr. Levine. Unfortunately, Dr. Hitchner felt an obligation to stay with Abbott Laboratories since he and his colleagues at L&M had just sold them their business, and they wanted him to head up a research and development program in Waukegan, IL. Therefore, he declined the offer that was made to him by Dean George Poppensiek, and other candidates were interviewed. None of those seemed to the Dean or to the faculty to be the right “fit” and so those of us on the faculty at that time urged Dr. Poppensiek to try once again to recruit Hitchner. To his enormous credit, he personally went to Chicago and convinced Dr. Hitchner to change his mind and accept the Cornell position. Thus, Steve Hitchner came to Cornell as Department Chairman in 1966. He resigned that position in 1975 but remained a faculty member until his retirement in 1981 when he became an emeritus professor.

Dr. Hitchner led by example. In addition to his administrative duties, he carried out independent research, collaborated with others in their research projects and directed work by various assistants. An example of collaborative work was in studies with Bruce Calnek in which they developed an important technique for isolating and freeze-drying certain herpesvirus vaccine strains, including a Marek’s disease virus vaccine for chickens and the human chickenpox vaccine. A patent on this technique resulted in significant royalties to Cornell.

In 1971, he took over responsibility for the core curriculum course on poultry diseases offered to veterinary students, teaching it through 1980. Also, he served as the mentor for three Ph.D. graduate students. He was a wise and steady influence for the faculty and staff in the Department allowing each to do his/her job without being overbearing, and he had the respect of all in the College.

There were several administrative matters that bear noting. He took a strong position in administering the Duck Research Laboratory (DRL) on Long Island, and was responsible for establishing a USDA-licensed biologics production facility at that laboratory. Also, he directed the activities of three Regional Poultry Laboratories, two of which he was forced to close in the early 1970s due to State fiscal problems.

One of Dr. Hitchner’s major contributions was to broaden the scope of the Department to include the field of aquatic animal medicine. To gain this responsibility, he argued that the Department was already “species-oriented,” that the faculty had considerable experience in dealing with “population medicine,” and that it had both facilities and expertise that could deal with this discipline. The expanded role of the Department required a name change to the Department of Avian and Aquatic Animal Medicine with an interesting acronym – DAAAM.

Yet another major contribution from Dr. Hitchner was the initiation of a program involving pet and exotic bird diseases. After he stepped down as Chairman, he concentrated on a new area which he felt had been largely neglected, i.e., pet bird medicine. Of course, diagnostic accessions in the Department occasionally included species other than domestic poultry, but there was no concerted effort to investigate diseases of pet birds. Canaries, budgerigars, parrots, etc. were species Hitchner concentrated on with his new focus, and given his background and his interests in disease prevention, it is not surprising that he undertook research aimed at the viral diseases that afflicted these species. He developed an inactivated herpesvirus vaccine used to immunize birds against Pacheco’s disease and a live canary pox virus which he attenuated in chicken embryos. The latter was provided to a commercial vaccine company and has been available for use in canaries for many years. Also, it has served as a vector of genetically- engineered vaccines.

In addition to administrative duties that were specific for the DAAAM, Dr. Hitchner served on several of the more important College committees during his tenure at Cornell. Also, he undertook a number of “extracurricular” activities. These included consultancies to the Pan American Health Bureau in Argentina (1967) and the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries in Bermuda (1970), serving as an advisor to the USDA (1970, 1972), chairing the editorial committees of the American Association of Avian Pathologists (AAAP) which published two editions of the manual Isolation and Identification of Avian Pathogens (1975, 1980), serving on the USDA Technical Advisory Committee on Newcastle Disease (1972), and serving on the editorial committee of Avian Diseases (1979, 1983, 1989). He was not one to shirk responsibilities and was quick to offer his services wherever they were needed. He helped establish the AAAP in 1957, and was its President in 1960- 61. He enjoyed many other honors during his career, as well.

During his career in avian medicine, he authored or coauthored 55 publications, 31 of which represented work at Cornell.

Steve enjoyed sports, particularly lacrosse. He was named an All-American lacrosse player during his years at Rutgers. At Cornell, he became a skilled handball player, always with the aim of good exercise and fun rather than focusing on the outcome of games (which he won much more often than not). After retirement, he kept in excellent physical condition and enjoyed work in the field of ornithology among other pursuits.

He is survived by Mariana, his wife of 67 years, and his children Roger, Sarabelle, Thomas, and Robert. His eldest son, Stephen, Jr., died of cancer in 1991.

Bruce W. Calnek, Chairperson; Julius Fabricant, Karel A. Schat

Douglas E. Hogue

August 8, 1931 – July 25, 2012

Douglas Emerson Hogue, Professor Emeritus of Animal Science and world-renowned specialist in sheep nutrition and management, died in Ithaca on July 25, 2012, after a brief illness. Born in Holdrege, Nebraska, to Emerson and Harriette Nelson Hogue, he was raised on cattle ranches in the Sand Hills of Nebraska, where he attended a one-room schoolhouse through the eighth grade. At 16 he moved with his family to Santa Rosa, California. After graduating from high school, he attended Santa Rosa Junior College and then transferred to and graduated from the University of California at Davis. Doug began his career at Cornell in 1953 as a graduate student in animal nutrition. After obtaining his Ph.D. degree in 1957, he was appointed assistant professor, with responsibility for the teaching and research program in sheep. Moving through the ranks, he was appointed associate professor (1963), professor (1973) and Professor Emeritus (1995). In retirement, Doug spent most mornings during the work week in his office in Morrison Hall, which was a gathering place at coffee time for a few of his colleagues who enjoyed the camaraderie and baiting as well as the research and other useful discussions that occurred. A long-time member of the department, Doug had become an institution in Morrison Hall, and his friendship and homespun counsel were sought and enjoyed by many, from custodians to faculty. Hogue’s research program resulted in improvements in the nutrition of ruminants and in the management of sheep and cattle throughout the world. His early work helped to establish the role of selenium in preventing nutritional muscular dystrophy (stiff lamb or white muscle disease). He readily collaborated with others, an example being an original experiment which estimated the glucose turnover of highly productive lactating sheep which was done in collaboration with Emmett Bergman in the Veterinary College. In addition to a substantial list of publications contributing to various aspects of nutrition, he developed several management plans for different-sized sheep farms that were adopted as references by the industry in the early 1960s. At that time he gave many of what some of his colleagues referred to as “big buck” talks across the country, explaining the relationship of mature size to growth and elaborating on how crossbreeding could be used to take advantage of this knowledge. He was a member of National Research Council committees that developed two successive editions of the widely used feeding standard, “Nutrient Requirements of Sheep.” Doug coined the term “accelerated lambing” to describe several schemes designed to make it possible to have market lambs available year round while improving production efficiency. A major contribution was the result of his work with Brian Magee (the Cornell shepherd) in developing the STAR accelerated lambing system, which exploits some sheep being able to breed aseasonally and 365 days being 2.5 times the length of pregnancy. This intensive system allowed lamb production to be raised from approximately one lamb per ewe per year to three, and required the development of a nutritional regimen that could support such a high level of production. More recently, he became an advocate of genotyping for the “M-gene” (specific allele of melatonin 1A receptor gene), known to be important in the ability of ewes to lamb aseasonally and to be exceptionally important in accelerated lambing. Some of Hogue’s research, especially in later years when he assumed responsibility for many of the sheep extension activities, was published in magazines and other practical outlets aimed at farmers.

Doug taught a popular course in sheep production. He enjoyed mentoring and interacting with students, both undergraduate and graduate, and sometimes baffled them with his keen sense of humor and attempts to make them think for themselves. He had a remarkable ability to reduce complex issues into a series of simple, clear-cut questions that were amenable to experimental testing. Along with Harold Hintz and Lennart Krook, he introduced to the journal literature the use of superscript letters to indicate statistical differences among tabulated means, an approach that is now universally adopted. His facility with mathematics and experimental design led him to help many students and some faculty with the design of experiments and sometimes with the statistical analysis of the resulting data. As an example, he helped design the elegant experiment of a graduate student that clearly demonstrated the futility of vaccinating young lambs against enterotoxemia and the importance of vaccinating the pregnant ewes.

Throughout his career, Doug Hogue carried evidence of his roots in western cattle country. He was fiercely independent (he did things Doug’s way), stoic, loyal, helpful and generous to family, friends and colleagues and he loved country music and stories. After his death his family fondly referred to him as the “consummate cowboy.” In retirement, he couldn’t help getting into the business of feeding beef cattle, an enterprise that almost certainly did not return a profit, but fitted perfectly into his idea of fun. He used to tell some of his colleagues pointedly that this was a better way to spend time than playing golf! Interestingly, during this interval, the cowboy scientist, over numerous “coffee hour” discussions about the control of feed intake, came up with a novel concept of balancing ruminant diets on the basis of fermentable fiber, which is totally at odds with current dogma, and used his cattle feedlot to help collect evidence for the hypothesis.

Professor Hogue is survived by his wife of 57 years, Deborah Vicars Hogue, his son James Hogue (Jeanette Crispell) of Bozeman, MT, his daughter Allison Hogue (Jim Bold) of Ithaca, NY, and his grandchildren, Brandon, Rachel, Samuel and Wesley Hogue, all of Bozeman, MT. Michael L. Thonney, Chairperson; W. Bruce Currie; J. Murray Elliot

Donald Holcomb

November 8, 1925 – August 9 , 2018

Donald Frank Holcomb died, in Ithaca, New York, on August 9, 2018. He was a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He also served as a NATO senior visiting fellow in Oslo, Norway in 1962; as a Guggenheim Fellow at the University of Kent, United Kingdom in 1968-69; and as a Science Research Council visiting fellow at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, in 1978. He was director of the Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics from 1964-1968, and chair of the Department of Physics from 1969-1974 and 1982-1986. He served as a faculty-elected member of the Cornell Board of Trustees during 1976-1981. He was president of the American Association of Physics Teachers in 1987-88, and received its Oersted Medal in 1996 for “notable contributions to the teaching of physics”.

Don’s physics research involved spin resonance phenomena, metalinsulator transitions in disordered systems, and non-stoichiometric transition metal oxides. He trained 16 Ph.D. students, several postdoctoral associates, and had productive collaborations with colleagues in Norway, Scotland, USSR, and South Africa. He was an active leader in physics education, and proponent of physics education research. He was instrumental in setting the pedagogical agenda for key courses at Cornell, and was part of a national debate about best practices in physics education. With co-author Philip Morrison, he wrote a textbook for non-science students entitled “My Father’s Watch: Aspects of the Physical World.”

His service to the university was commendable: In addition to his leadership roles, he was a notable presence at University Faculty meetings during very trying times in the 1960s and 1970s. Don had a talent for identifying and concisely summarizing the pertinent points in complex issues, in a way that brought opposing factions to a common understanding.

Don was born in Chesterton, Indiana. He grew up in Wood River, Illinois, attended DePauw University, and served two years in the US Navy. He subsequently earned a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign on the subject of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance in Alkali Metals. He came to Cornell in 1954 as an instructor in physics. He became an assistant professor in 1956, associate professor in 1958, and a full professor in 1962. He retired, and became an emeritus professor in 1995.

Don was passionate about the outdoors, with a particular fondness for cross-country skiing. He was an ordained elder and choir member of the First Presbyterian Church of Ithaca. He had a clear style, sporting distinctive string ties. For many years, he was involved in a notorious car pool with fellow physicists Bob Silsbee and Bob Cotts, where they drove an automobile which was largely held together by ingenuity and wishes. He made real human connections both in the Physics Department, and in the larger community.

Don was a loving husband and father. He married Barbara Page in 1950, and had three children, Douglas, Jane, and Nancy. Barbara passed away in 1998. He was close with his children, his six grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren.

Written by Erich Mueller, John Reppy, and James Sethna

Wolfgang Holdheim

August 4, 1926 – November 12, 2016

Born in Berlin, Wolfgang Holdheim relocated with his family to Amsterdam in 1939; his father, arrested there and transported to a Dutch concentration camp, subsequently perished at Auschwitz. After the end of World War II, Wolfgang immigrated to the United States to earn his B.A. in Philosophy and M.A. in French Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles.

With characteristic self-effacement he described his intellectual formation as consisting of a post-war fascination with sociology, a headlong flight into history, a transplantation into philosophy, and a disenchantment with strictly limited approaches to disciplinary boundaries enforced by academic departments. As a self-confirmed maverick, he veered toward the study of literature, but rejected concentrating upon its English variety because of his German accent, refused to take up its German variety because he already knew the language and was not totally unfamiliar with its major works, and embarked upon its French variety because he believed himself almost totally ignorant of it before starting graduate study.

In 1956 he completed his Ph.D. in Romance Studies at Yale University, where he studied under the direction of Erich Auerbach and Henri Peyre, with an interdisciplinary dissertation on the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and André Gide. His early teaching appointments were at Ohio State University, Brandeis University, and Washington University. During those years he published a monograph on the writing of Benjamin Constant (1961); an English translation of Max Scheler’s Ressentiment (1965, reprinted 1972, and 1994); a pioneering study of literary theory and comparative literary history laconically titled Theory and Practice of the Novel: A Study on André Gide (1968); and a ground-breaking correlation of approaches to the study of law and literature, Der Justizirrtum als literarische Problematik (“Judicial Error as Literary Theme,” 1969).

Wolfgang came to Cornell University in 1969 to chair the newly instituted department of Comparative Literature as the Frederick J. Whiton Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies. Already honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship before his arrival, he received other prestigious awards that included fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. During these years Wolfgang published a detailed account of nineteenth-century historical fiction titled Die Suche nach dem Epos (“The Search for Epic,” 1978) and a theoretical work on The Hermeneutic Mode: Essays on Time in Literature and Literary Theory (1984). No less important than these full-length books is a stream of essays, articles, and book chapters that appeared in distinguished publications on topics of philosophical phenomenology, literary hermeneutics, and the academic rigor of comparative literary study.

Upon retiring from Cornell in 1990, Wolfgang moved with his wife, Evelyn "Ava" (née Stanislawski), to Boca Raton, Florida. In 2008 he was predeceased by Ava after fifty-five years of marriage. They are survived by their daughter Sylvia Holdheim, Esq., of Sandia Park, New Mexico; their son Robert Holdheim of Hong Kong, China; and two grandsons, Sachin Holdheim and Saurin Holdheim. Despite the horrors of war that Wolfgang encountered at an early age, he lived a complete and happy life. Ever again with self-effacing irony he described his career as one of some import without undue concessions to modishness or any compromises on matters of intellectual principle. One can hardly ask for more. Having struggled for years with various health problems, he passed away peacefully in Reston, Virginia, at the age of 90.

Written by William J. Kennedy (Chair), Calum MacNeill Carmichael and Debra Ann Castillo

James R. Houck

October 5, 1940 – September 18, 2015

James R. Houck the Kenneth A. Wallace Professor of Astronomy and one of the pioneers of modern infrared astronomy passed away on September 18, 2015 after an extended illness.

Jim was born on October 5, 1940 to Elsa and James M. Houck in Mobile, Alabama, but spent most of his youth in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where his father was an engineer for Alcoa. Jim obtained a BS in Physics at Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1962 where he met his future wife, Elaine Vezzani. They were married in 1965 and remained so until her death in 2011. Jim earned his Ph.D. in solid state physics at Cornell University in 1967 and soon after began working with Professor Martin Harwit’s group in Cornell’s department of Astronomy developing the first liquid-helium-cooled rocketborne telescopes for infrared astrophysics. Jim’s solid state physics background was ideal for these experiments leading to the improvements in instrument design and reliability that were necessary for the first real successes. Rocket experiments were grand month-long campaigns at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Weeks were spent preparing the instrument payload for the launch which returned 5 minutes of astrophysical data. The next flight would typically occur in one year’s time. These were truly exciting times. Their sounding rocket based science discoveries included the first measurements of the far-infrared “glow” of interstellar dust heated by starlight in the Galactic Center, and the far-infrared detection of the faint dust cloud which lies in the plane of our solar system, the “zodiacal dust cloud”. The luminosity of the zodiacal dust was much more luminous than expected which indicated the dust grains are surprisingly black in the visible. These discoveries were later confirmed by NASA’s IRAS and COBE satellites.

Jim was soon hired as an Assistant Professor, starting his own very successful research group that continued to pioneer infrared astrophysics through a series of ground based, airborne, and space borne instrumentation over the next 45 years. In the 1970’s and early 1980’s Jim built spectrometers for NASA’s Convair 990, Lear Jet, and Kuiper Airborne Observatories making many of the first observations of the far-infrared fine-structure lines that are important coolants and physical probes of the gas in planetary nebula and HII regions. Jim’s group was one of the most successful on the airborne observatories creating and testing new technologies that would enable the first space missions, and making the first science discoveries that would illustrate the science promise of these missions. A remarkable result from the early Convair 990 experiments was the discovery of an infrared absorption band at 2.85 m due to water bound in a rocky substrate on the surface of Mars, amounting to “about one percent by weight of the surface material”. This discovery, reported in a paper led by Jim in 1973 was confirmed by the Mars Rover Curiosity through in situ experiments undertaken 40 years later.

Jim’s skills with infrared instrumentation were legendary and recognized early on. He was a key member of the science team of NASA’s first major infrared space mission, IRAS (1982-1983). IRAS was a liquid helium cooled telescope that performed the first all sky survey in the far-infrared. Shortly before launch, an electrical short disabled the 25 m band, one of the four “colors” necessary for astrophysical success. Jim realized that a clever, but simple rework of the warm electronics would save this array. The fix was implemented, and the mission launched with only a few days delay. As a result, IRAS was an extremely successful mission. Discoveries included the presence of debris disks – analogous to our zodiacal dust disk, but far more massive – around nearby stars. These debris disks were some of the first evidence for extrasolar system planetary systems, or at least comet and/or asteroid clouds. IRAS also revealed a population of dusty infrared bright “star burst galaxies” that are forming stars at hundreds of times the rate of our Milky Way galaxy, and the ultraluminous infrared galaxies (ULIRGs) with luminosities of a trillion suns who’s starlight is mostly absorbed by obscuring dust and remitted in the far-infrared bands. The IRAS discoveries were the cornerstone for a series of very successful NASA and ESA space missions that followed, including and especially, the Spitzer Space Telescope.

Spitzer, launched in 2003, was the final mission in NASA’s Great Observatories Program (which included the Hubble Space Telescope, the Gamma Ray Observatory and the Advanced X-ray Astronomy Facilities). Jim was the Principal Investigator on one of the three science instruments on Spitzer, the Infrared Spectrometer (IRS). The IRS was an elegantly simple, but extremely powerful design that Jim would frequently declare was “too dumb to fail”. It was even more successful than prelaunch predictions. The IRS science program brought a large, extremely talented team of young infrared astrophysicists to Cornell in the early 2000’s, and the wonderful combination of sensitivity and reliability the IRS delivered has led to more than 1100 citations to Jim’s Spizer instrument paper to date – more than 1100 science papers!

Spitzer had a rocky road to its launch. Originally conceived in the 1970’s to be mounted in the Space Shuttle as the Shuttle Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF), there were ups and downs based on scientific and programmatic factors leading to the decision to make the mission a free-flyer in the same year the science and instrumentation teams were selected, 1984. Despite a top ranking by the 1990 Decadal Review, the SIRTF concept suffered a near death due to drastic reductions in NASA’s space science budget shortly thereafter. Jim was a critical person in the rescue of SIRTF. He chaired the NASA Astrophysics Advisory Committee at the time and provided the extraordinary technical expertise and advocacy that was necessary for SIRTF to achieve a “new start” with critical redesign that could meet the new, much-reduced, mission cost cap.

SIRTF was launched in 2003, and renamed the Spitzer Space Telescope. The first science papers for Spitzer appeared in a special edition of the Astrophysical Journal in 2004. About 27 of these were based on IRS data. Spitzer IRS enabled many exciting fields of inquiry from planets in the solar system to protogalaxies in the distant Universe, but perhaps one of the most exciting result was a spectrum taken of a young protostar that was saturated with dozens of emission lines water. The water is literally “raining” down onto a dense gaseous disk that will likely form a planetary system. Jim was interested in all science applications of the IRS, but he primarily focused on uncovering the source of the tremendous energies found in the UILRG galaxies – star formation or black hole accretion – and on revealing the properties of dust and gas in extreme low metallicity galaxies in the local Universe. These studies provide the framework from which others have gone on with new facilities to explore the star formation processes in galaxies in the earliest times. The legacy of the Spitzer IRS is stored as the “Cornell Atlas of Spitzer IRS Sources” (CASSIS at cassis.sirtf.com) where it continues to be mined for data on sources from the solar system to quasars in the early Universe.

Jim’s excellence was widely recognized among the astronomical community. He was twice awarded the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal. First in 2005 "for outstanding contributions to IRAS, including efforts in the rebuilding of the telescope focal plane assembly and continuing scientific analysis.”, and then again in 2008 "for his work on the Spitzer Space Telescope infrared spectrograph.” He also received the prestigious Joseph Weber Award for Astronomical Instrumentation from the American Astronomical society “for his extraordinary contributions over nearly four decades to major instrumentation for infrared astronomy…Dr. Houck's contributions have been seminal to making infrared astronomy among the most exciting in the entire field. It is no exaggeration to say that without Dr. Houck's contributions, modern IR astronomy would never have reached its current level of maturity."

Jim also left a legacy of ground based instrumentation which include a string of successful spectrometers and bolometers that were built for the Palomar 200” telescope in California. Several of these instruments were initiated as part of a Cornell/Caltech collaboration that Jim started while on sabbatical leave at Caltech. Especially exciting were a pair the “SIRTF test-bed” spectrometers SpectroCam-10 and SCORE, and an adaptive optics spectrometer, PHARO which provided access to new science windows on a major telescope to researchers at both Cornell and Caltech.

Jim was also an inspiring teacher and was recognized as such by receiving the Clark Award for Distinguished teaching by the College of Arts and Sciences. He created the research quality Hartung-Boothroyd Observatory and its 25” reflector on Mount Pleasant just east of Ithaca for the purpose of teaching instrumentation and observational techniques. The telescope has been named the James R. Houck Telescope in his honor. A lasting legacy and testament to Jim Houck is the high esteem in which he is held by the dozens of Ph.D.s, a dozen postdocs, and hundreds of undergraduates who he has mentored in their research or taught in his classes. There are a remarkable number of leading scientists world-wide whose careers were launched under Jim’s mentorship including scientists in industry, academia, and national facilities, many of whom are leaders in their fields.

Jim was enthusiastic about the Steelers, Cornell Hockey, and the Himalaya mountains, where he took a month’s-long sojourn twice. I cannot agree with his enthusiasm for the Steelers, but Jim’s enthusiasm for science was infectious. He had a special ability to make complex physical concepts simple with straight-forward explanations appealing to everyday experience. From the acknowledgements of the Ph.D. thesis of one of his students: “Jim’s insight into physical puzzles has been inspiring – he has taught me at such a subtle level that it is not uncommon for me to begin solving a problem by first asking myself how he would solve it”. A quote was taped to Jim’s office door for more than a decade that summed up his positive attitude in a competitive field: “The best way to get even is to have a good life.”

Jim was remarkably attentive to the needs of others. He was always available for consultation on a new idea, and ready with helpful comments on your lab work and research proposal. A common refrain was “don’t polish a cannon ball”. If he thought you were going astray, he would drop everything to help put you back on the right path. In my particular case, what comes to mind was the day 25 years ago that I announced that my wife and I had put in a bid on a house in Ithaca. He asked where it was, then told me that is that was too busy a street for our young children. They will not be able to learn to bike and play safely – “plus the truck traffic at night will drive you crazy”. This every busy man, then dropped everything to give me a spontaneous 3 hour tour of Ithaca focusing on houses in low-traffic neighborhoods. I am eternally grateful for the gentle guidance he gave on this and many other issues in life and science. His presence is missed by all.

Jim was predeceased by his wife Elaine in 2011, and is survived by his two sons Chris (Tracy) and Robert (Michelle) and four grandchildren Adriana, Aiden, Joshua and Olivia, and his sister, Sara Horsman of Pittsburgh.

The department of astronomy will hold an international workshop titled “Science Enabled by Novel Infrared Instrumentation” in Ithaca, June 25-29, 2017 to honor the memory of Jim Houck.

Gordon Stacy and Jamie Lloyd

Richard Brian How

July 15, 1918 – June 26, 2012

R. Brian How, Professor Emeritus of Marketing, spent most of his professional life at Cornell University in the Department of Agricultural Economics in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, where he worked most effectively with his colleagues in the plant sciences seeking to improve the quality of the fruits and vegetables produced and marketed by farmers in the Northeast. He was an enthusiastic teacher, a good listener, and a hard worker. His textbook, Marketing Fresh Fruits and Vegetables,1991, New York, Van Nostrand & Reinhardt, Inc. was widely recognized as an important addition to the literature of the time. He was a leader in the use of mathematical programming in risk analysis and in guiding production decisions in fruit and vegetable processing plants. He also served the Department as its Extension Leader in the 1970s and 80s.

Richard Brian How was born in Montreal, Canada, on July 15, 1918, the son of Christian Carr Martin and Richard George How. He graduated from McGill University in 1939 and served in the Canadian Armed Forces during World War II. In 1944 he was among the Canadian armored divisions that landed at Juno Beach on D-Day, and was in northern Germany heading towards Hamburg when the war ended. He rose to the rank of Captain and served finally in the Armed Forces Intelligence Division. During the post-war reconstruction in late 1945 he led truck convoys for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, bringing supplies to the many corners of Europe.

Following World War II Brian entered the Graduate School at Cornell University and completed his M.S. in 1949 and his Ph.D. in 1951 under the direction of Professor Glenn Hedlund. He joined the faculty of the University of Saskatchewan in 1950 and advanced to the rank of Associate Professor. In 1954 he became an Associate Professor of Agricultural Economics at the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph and then moved to Cornell University in 1956 to his faculty position directing a program in marketing fruits and vegetables. He spent the summer of 1961 at the Green Giant Company learning about their methods of acquiring vegetables, their quality control programs with both growers and in their processing plants, as well as their development programs with buyers of their products. He sought similar opportunities to observe operations of processors in the Northeast building good relationships with their management and staying abreast of issues across the industry from farm to consumer outlets.

Together with one of his graduate students, Peter B. R. Hazell they presented one of the key papers at the IAAE meetings held in Minsk, USSR in 1970, “Obtaining Acceptable Farm Plans Under Uncertainty”, demonstrating how linear programming assisted in examining alternatives and providing good solutions for different yield and price situations. He and another student, Albert J. Nyberg, prepared another widely used bulletin, Mathematical Programming to Guide Production Decisions in Fruit and Vegetable Processing Plants, in 1964.

He sustained strong, professional, working -relationships with his colleagues at Universities in Canada, serving as an editor of the Canadian Journal of Agricultural Economics one year and, used a sabbatical leave to assist the Canadian Government in a study of horticultural crops and their potential for supplying additional markets. He also joined colleagues in rural sociology and labor relations at Cornell to publish a timely report on viable farmerworker relationships, a study of selected cases in New York State in 1966, a time of substantial unrest, when housing for summer labor was a topic of national interest. He responded willingly with the help of student assistants in obtaining relevant field data to answer questions of concern to growers, processors, and the larger marketing community.

After retiring from Cornell in 1988, Brian continued as an active participant in the Ithaca community. He was a member of the Cayuga Rotary Club, drove regularly for FISH, and donated his time working at Loaves and Fishes. He served on the Board of the Protestant Cooperative Ministry at Cornell and served as a Master Gardener for Tompkins County Cooperative Extension. He enjoyed hiking, camping, canoeing, sailing, skiing and skating until his health declined.

He and his wife, Janet Selke, met as graduate students at Cornell and married in September 1949. Together for 63 years, their children included George (1957-1993), Sarah How Alexander of Ithaca, NY, and Katherine How Conschafter of Midlothian, VA. Brian was pre-deceased by his parents, brother George, and sisters Lorraine and Anne. Janet Selke How continues to live at their home at 109 Birchwood Drive, Ithaca, NY.

Bernard F. Stanton, Chairperson; Gene A. German, Gerald B. White

John Hsu

April 21, 1931 – March 24, 2018

John Hsu was born in Swatow, son of Benjamin Hsu, director of the Bailey Theological Seminary and pastor of the Presbyterian Church, and Lucy Ma Zi, four of whose siblings were musicians. He began piano at four. After the Sino-Japanese War started, Swatow became unsafe and the Hsus fled to Hong Kong. Two years later they relocated to Shanghai. John was enrolled in a bilingual, ChineseEnglish school.

Shanghai opened a world of possibilities. John renewed his piano studies and soon was accompanying his father’s church choir on piano and organ, and eventually conducting it. During the 1930s, thousands of European Jews fled eastward, settling in Shanghai and establishing a culture-in-exile. John studied harmony, counterpoint, form and analysis, and orchestration with Wolfgang Fraenkel (18971983), Berlin composer, theorist, performer, and conductor. Continuing piano studies with a cousin, John added cello and was accepted for lessons by Johann Kraus, former first cellist of the Berlin State Opera. John didn’t have to go west to study Western music; the West had come to him.

World War II ended, John received a tuition scholarship at Presbyterian-affiliated Carroll College in Wisconsin. He loved to recount his other funding. The women of Swatow were famous for embroidery. Before John left China, they made a banquet-sized tablecloth, which by pre-arrangement he sold to a buyer in San Francisco for enough money to support a year’s study. At Carroll another refugee, principal cellist of the Milwaukee Symphony Joseph Schroetter, taught John for a semester and then advised him to transfer to a music school. Thus began John’s association with the New England Conservatory, where he earned Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees, was in 1971 awarded an Honorary Doctor of Music and in 2003, an Outstanding Alumni Award. After arthritis struck, John donated his precious David Tecchler cello (Rome 1711), which had been Joseph Schroetter’s, to NEC. The Conservatory yearly lends John’s Tecchler to an NEC cellist who deserves a fine instrument. John also endowed a scholarship at Carroll College. Thus he repaid the institutions that made his career possible.

Hsu came to Cornell in 1955 where he taught for 50 years. He was department chair 1966-1971 and named Old Dominion Foundation Professor in 1976. He gave lessons, conducted various ensembles, and taught courses in music theory, music history and historical performance practice. His decades at Cornell were marked by striking evolutions in his musical and scholarly activities. As John put it, “In retrospect, it seems that I undertook new musical explorations with each new decade.” A turning point occurred when Department chair Donald Grout asked John if, to expand the study and performance of early music, he would be interested in learning to play the viola da gamba. John agreed and Grout arranged to acquire a “chest” of viols (treble, tenor and bass). Once the instruments arrived, the die was cast.

During the following decades John became a leading performer and teacher of the six- and seven-string viola da gamba, baroque cello, five-string cello and that duckbilled platypus of instruments, the baryton. He toured North America and Europe with other performers, issued commercial recordings, and made Ithaca a center for such matters. For 24 summers, from 1970, John held institutes at Cornell, where gambists could work with him at a time when such opportunities were limited. John was also a mainstay of the Aston Magna early-music festival in Great Barrington, eventually becoming its director.

John’s friend Malcolm Bilson recalls those days:

I loved John Hsu like a brother. His influence shaped most of my musical life from the time I came to Cornell in 1968. He encouraged me to pursue study of the early piano, and persuaded Cornell’s Hull Fund to give me a grant to help me purchase one. John's summer viol courses were models for my own later Fortepiano Workshops. The Amadé Trio (John, our violinist colleague Sonya Monosoff and me), central to Music Department concerts in Barnes Hall in the 1970s, was considered groundbreaking for chamber music on original instruments on both sides of the Atlantic. John demonstrated that playing on historic instruments could bring one closer to the aesthetics of the time through study of the instruments and playing styles of the day. He set a standard that I have always done my best to come up to.

All this was more than enough for a single lifetime, but John had two other careers: conductor and musicologist. He conducted Cornell’s Collegium Musicum and Symphony Orchestra and at Aston Magna. He founded and conducted the Apollo Ensemble, with which he recorded Haydn symphonies, collaborating with Cornell’s noted Haydn expert, James Webster. He also led the Atlanta Baroque Orchestra and the Vivaldi Project.

John was of necessity largely self-taught as a gambist, but being the conscientious person he was, he didn’t reply solely on trial-and-error experimentation. Rather, he studied the music, instruction manuals, and other documents relating to the instrument and made them the basis of his playing and teaching. There was no textbook for the gamba, so John distilled his research and hands-on experience into A Handbook of French Baroque Viol Technique (1981). Performing and recording music of the leading composer of solo music for viola da gamba, Marin Marais (1656-1728), John found that reliable modern editions were lacking. Collating extant copies of original editions and surviving manuscripts of Marais’ instrumental music, he produced an impeccable critical edition in seven volumes (19802002). In 2001, the French government recognized his contributions by dubbing him Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des letters.

John was a musicians’ musician. It wasn’t just his versatility. Before he taught, performed, recorded or published a piece of music, he analyzed and pretty much memorized it. An incident illustrating that aspect of John’s gifts occurred at the farewell concert upon his retirement from Cornell. John had requested that the concert be a performance of Haydn’s oratorio, The Creation, with himself conducting a professional orchestra, the Cornell choirs and professional soloists. After John appeared to sustained applause, bowed and turned to the orchestra to begin the “Representation of Chaos,” he realized that he had forgotten his glasses and couldn’t read the score. As John explained with characteristic modesty, “Of course I had to continue conducting and fortunately knew the score well enough to get through without faltering.” John had conducted an hour and 45 minutes of Haydn’s music from memory!

John was the most loyal friend and colleague one could imagine. He was always ready to appear with a bottle of champagne to celebrate the successes of students and colleagues, and he maintained contact with wide circles of friends and relatives. Late in life John’s beloved wife Martha helped him to publish his autobiography, It’s All About Music: A Memoir (2015), to which this essay is indebted.

The reminiscences of two of John’s protégés—one of whom earned her doctorate under his supervision—can serve to explain why John exerted a profound influence on his students and so endeared himself to them.

I was one of John Hsu's cello students at Cornell University, and then developed that relationship as a friend and neighbor when he and his wonderful wife, Martha, moved near my home in North Carolina. John brought the music of the 18th century to life for me, unlocking the language and rhythms of its phrases with uncanny insight into their most expressive elements. He rarely told me precisely how to play something (cello playing seemed almost incidental in the larger scheme of things), but instead gave me the technical and intellectual tools I needed to make my own performance choices, and even more importantly, to continue to grow as a musician. A man of tremendous grace, a simple gesture of his arm, while playing, teaching, or conducting, could convey so much musical understanding. He embodied that same grace in the generosity and kindness with which he treated my family and me, and all who had the pleasure of knowing him. —Stefanie Vial

I had my first viol lessons with John during the summer of 1981 at the Aston Magna Academy and the Cornell Summer Viol School. The ways he helped me rethink my viol technique and also my understanding of much 17th and 18thcentury music transformed my work and career. The following year I applied to be in the inaugural class of DMA students at Cornell, but was unable to secure a leave from my teaching position in Minnesota. Then a position opened at UNC-Chapel Hill, and John’s recommendation was an important part of why I was hired. Unable to come to Cornell, I continued to study with him whenever possible. His mentoring throughout my professional life extended to my work as a cellist as well as viol player, helping me to become a more complete “thinking” musician and teacher. John became the model of what I wanted my own life as a musician in academia to be. After his retirement to Chapel Hill, I enjoyed having him and Martha nearby, and saw them often. It was always a joy to be with him, especially when he took us to his favorite Chinese restaurant. And I treasure his last round of musical advice, when we prepared a program of Haydn’s Baryton music in his honor in Chapel Hill. His mind was still at work considering new solutions to old questions. He also was still keenly aware of the people around him, and cared about their families and health. I feel I have lost not only my dearest teacher but a parent. —Brent Wissick

Written by Neal Zaslaw (chair) and Malcolm Bilson

Robert E. Hughes

May 24, 1924 – April 2, 2017

Dr. Robert E. Hughes, who taught, did research, and served Cornell for many years, passed away in Round Hill, VA on April 2, 2017. He will be remembered by his colleagues and students as a wise mentor, a man of excellent judgment, and a good friend.

Bob was born in New York City May 24, 1924. He grew up in Brooklyn and Queens, then on Long Island. After high school he started work at Union Carbide and Bakelite, at the same time going to “night school” at Cooper Union. Shortly thereafter he entered military service in World War II, working a meteorologist. In 1946, he considered Cornell, but instead studied at Lehigh.

Cornell was his only choice for graduate school, which he began in 1949. It was the beginning of his long career in X-ray crystallography. And what a beginning! Together with his supervisor, the legendary crystallographer Lynn Hoard, Hughes determined the structure of boron, a problem that had eluded the efforts of many crystallographers. Elemental boron has complex structure (that puts it mildly), with characteristic icosahedra. Linus Pauling said “This is the most beautiful structure I have ever seen.” Hughes went on to do a second boron structure, just as complex and beautiful. In just three years, he completed his Ph.D., in 1952, Bob Hughes began his career at the University of Pennsylvania, and entered a new field for him, polymer chemistry (there is a relation here to his early work at Bakelite) and then returned to Cornell in 1964. He did important crystallographic research, with excellent students and postdocs. He also served as the Director of the Cornell Materials Research Center, an important Cornell facility. Hughes played a role in the committee at ARPA that established the Materials Research Centers, and three years after returning to Cornell became CCMR’s third director.

His service to the nation was diverse and valuable. He was at one or another time Assistant Director of the National Science Foundation for National and International Programs, Assistant Director for Astronomical, Atmospheric, Earth and Ocean Science, and Assistant Director of the National Science Foundation for Scientific, Technological and International Affairs. Hughes has also headed U.S. Delegations to the Eighth Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting and a Special Preparatory Meeting on the Antarctic Treaty. He was also a member of several U.S.-U.S.S.R. Joint Committees or Commissions, and served as a delegate to the Board of the Binational U.S.-Israel Science Foundation and to the U.S.-India Joint Committee for Science and Technology.

Perhaps most significant in those years was Hughes’s service as President of Associated Universities, a non-profit association which manages national research laboratories for Government Agencies. The most important of their wards in Hughes’s time was Brookhaven National Laboratory- today they also run the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, and the North American portion of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), Green Bank Observatory, and the Long Baseline Observatory (LBO). Hughes took a special interest in Brookhaven.

Dr. Hughes was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Astronomical Society, the American Chemical Society, the American Crystallography Society, the American Physical Society, Sigma Xi and Phi Beta Kappa.

Bob Hughes was long married to LaVelma (Lou) Hughes, Cornell M.A. ’53, Ph.D. ’71. They had one son, Jeffrey. What all of his colleagues remember was the Hughes family hospitality at their lovely house in Cayuga Heights. Every summer they had a 4th of July party that became a Department institution, something we would look ahead to all summer. The party continued long after the Hughes family moved to the Washington area, as the Hughes family kept their Ithaca home.

There was a special wisdom to Bob Hughes. One immediately sensed no self-interest, and felt that his complete attention centered on you. He had good sense, good judgment, and was at ease with anyone. We and many others have benefitted over decades from talking with him, and his friendship.

Written by Roald Hoffmann (Chair), Benjamin Widom and Robert A. Plane

Karel J. Husa

August 7, 1921 – December 14, 2016

Cornell and the Department of Music mourn the loss of Karel Jaroslav Husa, Kappa Alpha Professor Emeritus, who passed away at his home in Apex, North Carolina. He was born in Prague.

Over the course of his long and illustrious career, Professor Husa was the recipient of several honors. These included the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 (for his String Quartet No. 3); the Grawemeyer Award, the most lucrative prize in classical music, in 1993 (for his Cello Concerto); and, in 1995, the Czech Republic’s highest civilian recognition, the State Medal of Merit, First Class. He also received nine honorary doctoral degrees and numerous other composition prizes and fellowships. Commissions came from some of the major arts organizations in the country, including the Koussevitzky Music Foundation, the New York Philharmonic (twice), the Chicago Symphony, and many others. As a conductor, he worked with major orchestras throughout Europe, Asia, and America, and as a guest conductor on many college campuses. Several of his works have entered the modern repertoire, led by Music for Prague, 1968 (commissioned for wind ensemble by Ithaca College, where he also taught from 1967 to 1986, and later transcribed by the composer for symphony orchestra), with over 7,000 performances to date. Husa’s music has been frequently recorded on major classical music record labels.

As a child, he studied violin and piano. He was also an avid painter (as he continued to be throughout his life), and hoped to pursue art study; however, his entry to the Prague Academy of Art was barred by its closure with the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1939. Embracing his concurrent interest in music, he studied composition (and on the side, conducting) at the Prague Conservatory under Jaroslav Řidký, 1941-1947. He completed his advanced diploma while living in Paris, having won a grant to study there with composers Arthur Honegger at the École Normale de Musique. Around this time, he also studied privately with the composer Nadia Boulanger and the conductor André Cluytens.

A prominent composer, Husa was equally at home at the podium. Initially hired in 1954 to teach music theory and composition at Cornell, his role broadened to conduct the Cornell Symphony in 1955. He served in both composing and conducting capacities until his retirement in 1992.

Professor Husa was widely acclaimed during his career, and his stature in the composition world was international in scope. However, in 1948 the Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakian government branded his compositions as “decadent” and in Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia, and his music went unperformed there until breakup of the Soviet Union in 1989. Banished, he composed Music for Prague, 1968 in response to the Soviet regime’s brutal quelling of the Prague Spring rebellion. This orchestral peon to his Czech homeland contains much symbolism, as his Forward to the piece explains, prominently a “Hussite war song from the 15th century, ‘Ye Warriors of God and His Law,’ a symbol of resistance and hope for hundreds of years” which no Czech listener would fail to recognize. As Husa recalled to the Los Angeles Times in 1986, he had already begun work on a score before the rebellion. “Then things started happening. I remembered a simple work song I heard quite often during the (Nazi) occupation in 1939. It has been sung by our people for over 500 years, ever since (religious reformer) Jan Hus was burned at the stake. It has kept the nation alive during all the occupations we’ve suffered.” A proliferation of chimes evokes Prague’s sobriquet, the City of Hundreds of Towers, and its magnificently sounding church bells as “calls of distress as well as of victory.” Husa begins the piece with a piccolo birdcall, “symbol of the liberty which the city of Prague has seen only for moments during its thousand years of existence.” Upon the breakup of the Soviet bloc in 1989, Husa was at last invited to conduct this piece, as former colleague and current Chair of Conducting and Ensembles at the Eastman School of Music, Mark Davis Scatterday, recalls. “When he finally conducted in a country where he had been banned for over forty years,” Scatterday writes, “it was a poignant homecoming, marking not only the success and perseverance of an individual artist, but heralding a changing world – changing this time in favor of new hope, new freedom, new dignity.”

Composer Roberto Sierra, Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities, notes that Husa was “one of the most distinguished and admired composers of the second half of the 20th century. At Cornell he taught generations of composers who became important figures in the American musical landscape.” Sierra adds that Husa “will be remembered for his great music and unique compositional voice.” A former student and colleague of Husa’s, the late Steven Stucky, Given Foundation Professor Emeritus, said in a 2012 statement that although steeped in modernist compositional techniques, “his personal passion and the really highly dramatic nature of his music made it approachable even though it was unfamiliar. I think that was a big step in the reception of modern American music in this country.” Illustrating the point, Scatterday recalls breaking down emotionally at a first performance of one of Husa’s iconic works – Apotheosis of This Earth (1971) – in a new arrangement that the composer also conducted. “I was not embarrassed by this moment,” Scatterday reveals, recalling it instead as a “changing point in my career.” Since that life-altering event, Scatterday has “always strived to experience this kind of true emotion” in his own musical work. In fact, Scatterday points out, Apotheosis grew from Husa’s personal encounter with the effects of pollution – dozens of dead fish washed onto the shore of Cayuga Lake. With this emotionally searing work, Husa hoped to call attention to “Man’s brutal possession and misuse of nature’s beauty,” as he wrote in the Forward, “which – if continued at today’s reckless speed – can only lead to catastrophe.”

Karel Husa is survived by his wife of 64 years, the former Simone Perault; four daughters, Catherine Husseini, Anne-Marie Katerji, Elizabeth Evola and Caroline Husa Bell; 10 grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

Written by Steven F. Pond (Chair), Roberto Sierra and Mark Davis Scatterday