Hamilton College will honor four of its own illustrious alumni, plus an education scholar and a jazz music great, with the presentation of honorary degrees at the College's 189th commencement on Sunday, May 20.
Honorary degree recipients are Dr. John M. Driscoll, Jr., 1958 Hamilton College graduate and chairman of the department of pediatrics at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York; Dr. Paul Greengard, 2000 Nobel Prize winner in Physiology or Medicine and a 1948 graduate; Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, author, Harvard professor and education scholar; Ralph Sutton, jazz pianist; Tom Vilsack, governor of Iowa and a 1972 Hamilton graduate; Melinda Wagner, 1999 winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Music, and a 1979 graduate of Hamilton College.
The honorary degrees will be presented during Hamilton's commencement exercises on Sunday, May 20, beginning at 10:30 a.m. on the Main Quadrangle.
Dr. John M. Driscoll, Jr.
Dr. John M. Driscoll became chairman of pediatrics at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York in 1997 after serving as acting chairman since 1992. The Columbia trustees also named him as the Reuben S. Carpentier Professor of Pediatrics.
A 1958 graduate of Hamilton, he obtained his M.D. from Bowman Gray School of Medicine, Wake Forest University.
Dr. Driscoll has been director of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) since 1971. Under his leadership the NICU has gained international recognition for its innovative approach to the treatment of respiratory distress in premature and full-term infants.
Driscoll has been an active leader in teaching and practicing pediatric medicine. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Maternal & Fetal Medicine and as a reviewer for the American Journal of Pediatrics, the American Journal of Diseases of Children, and Pediatrics. He has been an investigator in several NIH studies, including the natural history of retinopathy in prematurity, which is the leading cause of blindness in premature infants. Driscoll also took part in a Scientific Center for Research (SCOR) grant, in which he established the neonatal follow-up program in 1975. He served on the executive committee of the perinatal section of the American Academy of Pediatrics between 1987 and 1993, and was chairman of the organization between 1990 and 1992.
Dr. Paul Greengard
Dr. Greengard heads the Laboratory of Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience and directs the Fisher Center for Research on Alzheimer's Disease at The Rockefeller University. He won the 2000 Nobel Prize with two colleagues for their insights into the way information is communicated within cells. His work, which is part of the neuroscience curriculum at Hamilton, reveals some of the fundamental mechanisms of how the brain works and has identified potential therapies for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. Dr. Greengard was back on the Hamilton campus in 1995 when he presented the annual Plant Lecture and received an Alumni Medal as part of the 30th anniversary of the establishment of Hamilton's Sigma Xi chapter.
Greengard earned a Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University, and completed postdoctoral studies in biochemistry at the University of London, Cambridge University and the National Institutes for Medical Research in England, and the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD. He served as director of the department of biochemistry at Geigy Research Laboratories, and was visiting associate professor and professor of pharmacology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in NY. Greengard also was professor of pharmacology and psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine from 1968-1983 before going to the Rockefeller University as professor and head of the Laboratory of Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience in 1983.
Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot
Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, a nationally recognized scholar of education, spoke at Hamilton in a Kirkland Project series, "Educating for Democracy: The Challenge and Richness of Difference" in 1999. Lawrence-Lightfoot studies the schools as social systems, the patterns and structures of classroom life, the relationships between adult developmental themes and teachers' work, and socialization within families, communities and schools.
Lawrence-Lightfoot is the author of numerous articles, monographs and chapters. She has written six books: Worlds Apart: Relationships Between Families and Schools (1978), Beyond Bias: Perspectives on Classrooms (1979, with Jean Carew), and The Good High School: Portraits of Character and Culture, which received the 1984 Outstanding Book Award from the American Educational Research Association. Her book, Balm in Gilead: Journey of a Healer (1988) won the 1988 Christopher Award, given for literary merit and humanitarian achievement. It was followed by I've Known Rivers: Lives of Loss and Liberation (1994); The Art and Science of Portraiture (1997, with Jessica Hoffman Davis); and her most recent book, Respect: An Exploration (1999). Another book, Natural Enemies, is forthcoming in 2002 through Random House.
In 1984 she received the prestigious MacArthur Prize Award, and in 1993 she was awarded Harvard's George Ledlie Prize given for research that makes the most valuable contribution to science and the benefit of mankind. In 1993 the Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot Chair, an endowed professorship established at Swarthmore College, was named in her honor. In 1998 she was the recipient of the Emily Hargroves Fisher Endowed Chair at Harvard University, which upon her retirement, will become the Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot Endowed Chair, making her the first African-American woman in Harvard's history to have an endowed professorship named in her honor.
Ralph Sutton
Ralph Sutton, noted jazz pianist, played in and around St.Louis in the late 1930s before joining Jack Teagarden's band in 1941. In 1947 he appeared on the weekly radio show "This is Jazz," then worked as the intermission pianist at Eddie Condon's club in New York City, while also touring Europe and the U.S. In 1956 Sutton moved to the San Francisco Bay area to play in jazz clubs there. Sutton recorded "Jazz at the Olympics" on the Omega label in 1960.
He was a founding member with Yank Lawson and Bob Haggart of "The World's Greatest Jazz Band," in 1968, in which he played the piano for five years. From that time Sutton toured the Americas, Europe and the Orient, playing in concerts, clubs, private parties and recording sessions. In the early 1980s he made a series of duo recordings with various musicians; in 1982 he opened the Newport Jazz Festival in New York City with a solo concert in the Carnegie Recital Hall. He appeared at the Kool Jazz Festival, New York, in 1983, and performed at Dick Gibson's Colorado Jazz party in Denver in 1985.
Sutton has appeared on the Dick Cavett Show, Ed Sullivan Show, Today Show, and the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Sutton has been called "without a doubt the greatest exponent today of the two hands and two fingers style of jazz piano playing…undoubtedly one of the best pianists in jazz today," by Ralph Gleason of the San Francisco Chronicle.
Tom Vilsack
In 1998 Vilsack became the first Democrat elected governor of Iowa in more than 30 years. A native of Pittsburgh, he earned a bachelor's degree from Hamilton in 1972 and graduated from Albany Law School in 1975. He was a partner in his father-in-law's law firm, the Bell and Vilsack Law Office, from 1975 to 1998, where he won notable verdicts for farmers defrauded in the Prairie Grain Elevator case, and in a class action that returned $13 million to 86,000 policyholders. He served as mayor of Mount Pleasant, Iowa, from 1987-1992. Vilsack served as State Senator in Iowa's 49th District from 1992-1998, where he helped shape legislation for the Democratic majority between 1993 and 1996.
In the governor's race, Vilsack defeated Republican nominee, U.S. Rep. Jim Lightfoot, who was a heavy favorite and remained ahead in most polls until election day.
Vilsack recently was featured in a TIME Magazine article (3/19/01) that described his new plan to fight population drain in Iowa by luring immigrants to the state. Through the plan Vilsack has designated three towns as Model Communities. Their mission is to devise a plan for recruiting immigrants from other states and refugees who might be attracted by Iowa's low cost of living. Vilsack has also opened two New Iowan Centers in Muscatine and Sioux City. They are referral agencies that provide immigration help and job advice.
Vilsack and his wife, Christie, a 1972 Kirkland College graduate, have two sons, Jess, a 2000 graduate of Hamilton College, and Doug, a sophomore at Colorado College.
Melinda Wagner
After receiving her bachelor of arts in music from Hamilton in 1979, Wagner earned a master's degree in music composition from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in music composition from the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied with Richard Wernick, George Crumb, Shulamit Ran and Jay Reise.
Wagner's orchestral, chamber and vocal works have been performed by such ensembles as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Denver Symphony Orchestra, American Composers Orchestra, National Orchestra of Columbia, New York Music Ensemble, the Syracuse Society for New Music, the Contemporary Chamber Players, and Orchestra 2001. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, grants from the Illinois Arts Council and Meet the Composer, Inc.; three ASCAP Young Composer awards; and resident fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. She has received commissions from the Ernst and Young Emerging Composers Fund for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Sylvia and Danny Kaye Playhouse, the New York New Music Ensemble, and the Syracuse Society for New Music.
"Falling Angels," commissioned by the Chicago Symphony and premiered in 1993, was performed there again in 1996 under the AT&T American Encore program. Current projects include works for the American Brass Quintet and the New York New Music Ensemble. Her Concerto for Flute, Strings and Percussion won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Music. She has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Swarthmore College, Syracuse University and Hunter College.
