VOL. 23, NO. 7	OCTOBER 24, 1997

• Two retired professors in Columbia's School of Public Health have received 75th Jubilee Medals from the medical school of the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, in recognition of their attainments and contributions to the field: Mervyn Susser, Gertrude H. Sergievsky Professor Emeritus of Epidemiology, former director of the Sergievsky Center, and former professor and head of the Division of Epidemiology, and Zena Stein, professor emerita of psychiatry and public health (epidemiology) and former associate dean of research and academic affairs. Susser is editor of the American Journal of Public Health; Stein is an expert in the prevention of AIDS in women and on the prevention of mental retardation.

  Eisenthal. Record Photo by Joe Pineiro.

• The American Chemical Society will award its 1998 Arthur W. Adamson Award for Distinguished Service in the Advancement of Surface Chemistry to Kenneth B. Eisenthal, chairman and professor of chemistry at Columbia. The award, which consists of $5,000, an inscribed gold medal and a bronze replica, will be presented Mar. 31 at the society's spring national meeting in Dallas. Eisenthal is a pioneer in the use of laser methods to study the chemistry of liquid surfaces and will lecture on the subject at the awards symposium.

• Charles Di Como, a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia, has been named a Runyon-Winchell Fellow by the Cancer Research Fund of the Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell Foundation, one of 56 young scientists so honored. Di Como's three-year fellowship will allow him to investigate "Restoring wild-type function to mutant p53 proteins" in the laboratory of Carol Prives, Da Costa Professor of Biological Sciences, where he has worked since 1996. P53 is a tumor suppressor that prevents cells from dividing if their DNA is damaged, then induces the damaged cell to commit suicide. Mutations in the p53 gene have been implicated in more than half of all human tumors, including breast and lung cancer. Dr. Di Como hopes to identify small molecules that can penetrate a tumor, bind to mutant p53 proteins and restore their function.

• Four films by Columbia filmmakers will be screened at N.Y.U.'s International Student Film Festival in Florence, Italy, Oct. 25-31. The films, Thumb by Suzanne Riss, Ticket to Ride by Maria Essen, Flux by Patrick Stettner, and The In-Between by Michael Rauch, join a roster of more than 60 films by students from other esteemed film schools, such as U.S.C., U.C.L.A., N.Y.U., and from programs based in Australia, Israel, France, the Czech Republic, Italy, Russia and other sites around the world.

Correction

  An item in the Sept. 19 People column should have stated that Dr. Larry Ebers is the director of the National Center for Children in Poverty at the School of Public Health.