Berkeleyan

Awards

04 February 2004

Lowell Bergman
“Dangerous Business,” a Frontline documentary for which Adjunct Professor of Journalism Lowell Bergman served as a writer and correspondent, is a winner of a duPont-Columbia University Award for broadcast journalism. Former Berkeley students James Sandler and Robin Stein served as reporters for The New York Times and associate producers for the hour-long investigation of worker safety at foundries owned by McWane, Inc. The documentary was a collaboration between Frontline, the Times, and the Canadian Broadcasting Company.

“TV and radio journalists covering the war in Iraq reached an historic turning point in war coverage with the practice of embedding journalists with military units and the immediacy of satellite technology,” said David Klatell, chair of the duPont-Columbia Award jury and academic dean at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. “But only a few news organizations used these journalistic opportunities to give the American people the context the war story deserved. That takes time and responsible editing.”

The award was one of 13 “silver batons for excellence” in television and radio journalism awarded nationally, out of nearly 600 submissions. In their citation, the nine jurors called “Dangerous Business” “investigative journalism of both the public and private sectors at its best.”

Winners were honored at a Jan. 21
ceremony at Columbia University, hosted by ABC News anchor Ted Koppel. A one-hour documentary about the award winners — “Without Fear or Favor: The Best in Broadcast Journalism” — began being broadcast nationwide on PBS stations on Jan. 26.

Dacher Keltner, Jeffrey Prince
Two members of the Berkeley campus have been elected by their peers as Fellows of the American Psychological Association for 2004. They are Dacher Keltner, associate professor of psychology, and Jeffrey Prince, director of Counseling and Psychological Services at University Health Services.

Fellows of the APA — the world’s largest association of psychologists — are selected for their outstanding contributions to the research, teaching, or practice of psychology. They must also demonstrate the national impact of their work, such as numerous research-based publications, leadership roles within the field, or community service in their clinical practice.

James Sethian
Professor of Mathematics James Sethian, head of the Mathematics Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has been awarded the Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics by the American Mathematical Society (AMS) and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).

The prize is awarded for an outstanding contribution to applied mathematics. Sethian’s work has influenced fields as diverse as medical imaging, seismic research by the petroleum industry, and the manufacture of computer chips and desktop printers.

The two professional societies, in their award citation, referred to Sethian’s “seminal work on the computer representation of the motion of curves, surfaces, interfaces, and wave fronts, and for his brilliant applications of mathematical and computational ideas to problems in science and engineering.” His research, they said, “is a shining example of what applied mathematics can accomplish to benefit science as a whole.”

The prize was presented Jan. 8 at the joint AMS-SIAM meeting in Phoenix. Sethian’s award marks the eighth time the Wiener Prize has been presented since 1970. In 2000, one of the two recipients was Alexandre Chorin, a colleague of Sethian’s in the math department and at Lawrence Berkeley Lab.