Manson Appointed Director of the UC Jazz Ensembles
Bevan Manson has been named director of the UC Jazz Ensembles. Manson
will be the fifth professional director since its establishment in 1971.
Manson said he hopes to pursue, with students, "a number of initiatives
to widen the scope of UC jazz in the performance and academic areas. I am
looking forward to working on such projects as recording, concerts and new
presentations at Berkeley and at other venues outside of town."
Manson's prior teaching experience includes faculty positions at the
New England Conservatory of Music, Tufts University, the Thelonious Monk
Institute at New England Conservatory of Music, South Shore Conservatory
and Berklee College of Music in Boston.
He has extensive experience as a teacher, professional performer, arranger
and composer. Manson also has a background in film scoring for public television,
feature films, TV movies and documentaries.
Manson has performed at a number of festivals and with a wide variety
of artists, and has made many jazz recordings. His classical works include
a piano concerto, clarinet sonata and music written for the American Music
Ensemble.
A native of New York City, Manson holds a masters degree in jazz and
contemporary media from the Eastman School of Music, Rochester, N.Y., and
a bachelor's degree in music theory, also from Eastman. Honors to his credit
include first place at the 1989 Great American Jazz Piano Contest at the
Florida International Jazz Festival and the 1983 IAJE Composition Award
for "Groove Yard Central," written for big band.
1996 Chemistry Nobelist to Lecture Feb. 25, 26
Harold Kroto, winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and Royal Society
Research Professor at the University of Sussex, England, will deliver the
Hitchcock Lectures on campus Feb. 25 and 26.
The Feb. 25 lecture is titled "Science: a Round Peg in a Square
World"; the topic the following afternoon is "C60 Buckminsterfullerene,
Not Just a Pretty Molecule." Both lectures take place at 4:10 p.m.
in International House. They are free and open to the public.
Kroto was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the 1985 discovery
of a previously unknown class of carbon molecule, C60 Buckminsterfullerene.
These and similar molecules were dubbed "fullerenes" or "buckyballs"
because their geodesic molecular structures are suggestive of the architectural
domes designed by R. Buckminster Fuller.
Since then, chemists have synthesized some 5,000 variants of the buckyball,
including elongated spheroids, sheets of carbon and microscopic tubes, opening
a universe of possibilities based on how nature bonds carbon atoms. These
tubes are believed to have greater tensile strength than anything yet made.
Among his many affiliations, Kroto chairs the editorial board of the
Chemical Society Reviews. His awards include the 1994 Hewlett Packard Europhysics
Prize, the 1993 Longstaff Medal and the Knighthood in 1996.
Kroto was born in 1939 in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, and attended the University
of Sheffield. He received a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1961 and a
doctoral degree in 1964.
The Hitchcock Lectures, administered by the Graduate Division, are named
in honor of Charles M. and Martha Hitchcock. Hitchcock's 1885 bequest established
a professorship for free lectures on scientific and practical subjects.
William Banks Featured on History Channel
William Banks, professor of African American studies, is among the nationally
known scholars featured in "The Secret Life of the Ku Klux Klan,"
a documentary airing this month on the History Channel.
Unlike other accounts of the Klan, "Secret Life" focuses on
the group's activities in the North, during the first half of the 20th Century.
Banks is author of the award-winning history of black American intellectuals
over 250 years, "Black Intellectuals: Race and Responsibility in American
Life," published in 1996 by W.W. Norton.
Nobelist Michael Bishop Is New UCSF Chancellor
Nobel laureate J. Michael Bishop, one of the world's foremost medical
researchers and a leading advocate for science education and increased public
investment in scientific research, was named UCSF chancellor on Feb. 6.
On the recommendation of UC President Richard Atkinson, the Board of
Regents appointed Bishop, a longtime member of the UCSF faculty, during
a meeting conducted by teleconference. The appointment is effective July
1.
Bishop, 61, will become the eighth person to lead UCSF in its 135-year
history.
He will succeed Haile T. Debas, dean of the UCSF School of Medicine.
Debas accepted the chancellorship in July 1997 after former Chancellor Joseph
B. Martin left to become dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard. Debas
planned to serve as chancellor no longer than a year. 
| 