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"Eisenstein's one-on-one teaching is really exciting to watch. She actively engages the students in the classroom (Socratic method), and her energy and quick mind set a high standard for an individual research student to match," said Kenneth Caulton, IU's distinguished professor of chemistry. Eisenstein also takes a personal interest in how the students respond. "The following is characteristic of her working style," Caulton said. "She simply walks into a Ph.D. student research lab and says, ‘Hello. What new results do you have today?' "
When such inquiries are made, they carry weight, for Eisenstein is a scientist of renown.
"She is recognized the world over as an authority on the electronic structure of molecules," explained Malcolm H. Chisholm, distinguished professor of chemistry. "Her theoretical work ranges from the use of a pencil or pen with paper to some of the most sophisticated computational methods available." Although she is well-known for her work with theory, she is frequently sought after in the fields of inorganic and organometallic chemistry for collaborations with experimentalists. Her collaborations with members of the IU faculty have resulted in more than 30 co-authored publications and have attracted substantial research funds to the program here.
"Most of all she thinks and teaches," said Chisholm, "looking for common trends and explaining matters to the lay person in terms of basic principles of science. It is indeed this aspect of her personality that makes her so attractive as a collaborator and she actively pursues this role. She is in a sense a ‘global doctor' who makes house calls to those in need of [theoretical] assistance."
When not in Bloomington or Montpellier, Eisenstein travels the globe. She has delivered invited lectures in Amsterdam, York and Sheffield in England, Florence, Brisbane, Vancouver, Nagoya in Japan, and at numerous sites in France and the United States. She has won the French Prix Le Bel, Prix Langevin, and the Silver Medal for Chemical Sciences of the French National Research Society. Since 1993, Eisenstein has been editor of the New Journal of Chemistry.
Eisenstein credits her mother, Basia Lipkowicz, for emphasizing education and reminding Eisenstein that "there is no barrier when one tries hard." Lipkowicz had migrated from Poland to Paris in 1929 to avoid job restrictions put on Jews, and she dreamed that her daughter would become an architect or bridge builder. As it turned out, Eisenstein became an architect of the future of chemistry.
Even though she is sought after worldwide, Odile Eisenstein still knows how to build strong friendships. Henry H. H. Remak, former director of IU's Institute for Advanced Study, said, "What makes her, in the six and a half years (1988-94) during which I was in charge of the institute, absolutely unique among our many international fellows is her long, continuous, profound commitment to Indiana University faculty and students."
Haas was born in Germany in 1916. He studied at the Mannheim Conservatory and the University of Heidelberg, then left for the United States in the 1930s as the threat of Nazism was spreading. He settled in Detroit, where he attended the city's Netzorg School of Music. He also regularly commuted to New York to study with legendary pianist Artur Schnabel.
His broadcast career began in 1950 with the hosting of a weekly preview of concerts by the Detroit Symphony. In 1959 Detroit radio station WJR offered Haas the opportunity to create his own daily one-hour program on which he could present both music and commentary. Adventures in Good Music -- the longest-running and most listened-to daily program of classical music in the world -- has been on the air ever since. Today it is broadcast in more than 200 cities in the United States and by 400 U.S. Armed Forces Network stations on all continents; among its many international versions is a French production in Canada and a Spanish production in Mexico City. "Adventures in Good Music manages to erase the line which often separates entertainment and education; it addresses itself to a wide audience of professionals, amateurs, and just plain music lovers," observes Bernhard Heiden, professor emeritus of music at Indiana University.
Adventures in Good Music has twice been awarded the George Foster Peabody Award for excellence in broadcasting. Haas has received both the Officier d'académie and the Chevalier de l'ordre des arts et lettres from the French government. Germany has awarded him its First Class Order of Merit. In 1991 Haas received the National Endowment for the Humanities' prestigious Charles Frankel Award at a White House ceremony. In 1997 he was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame, the first and only classical broadcaster who has received this honor.
Haas maintains an active performance schedule, regularly selling out halls around the country. In the fall of 1997, for example, he gave his fortieth concert series at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the live version of Adventures in Good Music, to a standing-room-only audience. He has guest-conducted the Boston Pops Orchestra (after being named Person of the Year by the city's radio station WCRB) and the Buffalo Philharmonic (in a benefit concert for the orchestra, which was struggling financially). "He never seems to tire of his lifelong goal," writes IU professor of journalism Peter Jacobi, "to bring the joys of music, good music, to the many."
Throughout his career, Haas has supported music programs at Indiana University. He first presented a series of lectures and concerts on the Bloomington campus in the 1950s at the invitation of School of Music Dean Wilfred C. Bain. Since then he has returned to participate in concerts to benefit music scholarship funds. He also delivered the eulogy at the memorial tribute to his longtime friend, the distinguished IU professor and world-renowned violinist Josef Gingold. In the fall of 1998 Haas will present a series of lectures at IU Bloomington on art and music.
Haas has authored a definitive reference book, Inside Music, now in its tenth printing. His best-selling recordings, including The Romantic Piano and Story of the Bells, are considered classics.
A native of Mansfield, Ohio, Sylvia McNair grew up in a musical family. Her musical education began at age three with piano lessons from her mother. She earned a bachelor of music degree from Wheaton College in Illinois and a master of music degree, with distinction, from Indiana University, in 1983. As an undergraduate, she intended to become an orchestral musician. However, when one of her violin instructors suggested that she take voice lessons to refine her technique, she discovered that she enjoyed singing more than playing the violin.
"When she came to me as a student, it was clear that Sylvia was a major talent with great potential," writes IU Distinguished Professor of Voice Virginia Zeani. "Sylvia is today considered one of the great singers of her generation. She is heard in all the major opera houses and cities of the world. She is a great singer of both opera and oratorio. The vocal achievement combined with her extraordinary dramatic ability give her a total, unsurpassed presence."
In 1980 Robert Shaw visited Indiana University to direct a performance of Bach's B Minor Mass. Sylvia McNair was the soprano soloist. Shaw liked what he heard -- so much so that he invited her to sing with the Atlanta Symphony and record on the Telarc label before she had finished her degree. In 1982, she won the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, made her London concert debut, and received a Grammy nomination for her first recording, Poulenc's Gloria. With her career under way, she was able to work full time as a singer from the moment she graduated from IU.
In 1990 Sylvia McNair was the first recipient of the prestigious Marian Anderson Award. During the 1996-97 season, she sang at Carnegie Hall to celebrate the100th anniversary of the birth of the world-renowned contralto. Also during that season she was featured with the New York Philharmonic in a world-premiere composition written for her by Andre Previn.
Highlights of Sylvia McNair's recent seasons include a 1993 Grammy for a Deutsche Grammophon recording of Handel's Semele, a 1996 Grammy for The Echoing Air: The Music of Henry Purcell, and a tour of Japan with the Berlin Philharmonic and Claudio Abbado. She performed during the summer of 1997 as Pamina in Mozart's The Magic Flute at the Salzburg Festival, with Christoph von Dohnanyi conducting the Vienna Philharmonic. Sylvia McNair often collaborates in recital and concert with her husband, conductor and pianist Hal France, whom she first met in 1984 during a rehearsal of the Indianapolis Symphony. This summer they will perform together at the Santa Fe Opera in an American premiere of Ingar Lidholm's new opera, A Dream Play, based on a play of the same name by the Swedish author August Strindberg. "Sylvia is one of most outstanding vocal majors ever to attend the School of Music," says Dean Emeritus of the IU School of Music Charles H. Webb. "She exemplifies the highest standards that this university espouses, and is a hallmark of excellence for all musicians everywhere to emulate."
A native of Wabash, Indiana, Smith earned a bachelor of science degree from the IU School of Business in 1961. He graduated from the IU School of Law -- Bloomington in 1964, and went from there to Columbia University Law School, where he earned an LL.M., and the Yale Law School, where he was a senior fellow in the Commonwealth Program in Law, Science, and Medicine. For the past 20 years he has served on the faculty of the Columbus School of Law at the Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C., where he holds the rank of full professor. He was honored as the professor who most influenced law studies by Catholic University's Class of 1996.
Smith's scholarly output is vast and significant. He has published more than one hundred scholarly works, including four books; three monographs; 17 articles on international, comparative, or maritime law; 44 articles on bioethics, medicine and technology, or family law; approximately two dozen articles on legal education, jurisprudence, and property and environmental law; and a wide range of reviews and essays. Reviews of his work often cite Smith's willingness to tackle challenging topics. For example, a reviewer of a collection of Smith's essays, New Biology: Law, Ethics, and Biotechnology, said: "This book will inform, irritate, exasperate, and illuminate the reader. Such is the controversy of the topic the author has tackled for the lawyer and the citizen who is brave enough to contemplate our biological future."Another reviewer describes Smith as a "prescient prophet of the New Biology. . . committed to looking into dark places in order to shed a discernable light into what is seen there."
Smith's "discernable light" -- and his willingness to share it -- is apparent in the list of more than 50 prestigious institutions that have invited him as a visiting professor, lecturer, fellow, or scholar. These include the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, Yale University, Columbia University, the University of Virginia, Duke University, Northwestern University Medical School, Trinity College of Dublin University, and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana in Rome. Smith has held a Fulbright fellowship and a Fulbright professorship at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He has been a visiting fellow at the IU Institute for Advanced Study, which awarded him the Citation of Honor in 1985. That same year Smith was given the IU Distinguished Alumni Medallion and Citation for Achievements in the Legal Profession, as well as a Distinguished Alumni Service Award.
Smith is a generous contributor to many facets of Indiana University, including the IU Musical Arts Center, Auer Hall, the Indiana Memorial Union Arts Guild, and the IU Auditorium. He is the founding benefactor of the George P. Smith II Distinguished Professorship and Chair of Law and Legal Research at the IU School of Law, and a member of the school's Board of Visitors.
According to Alfred C. Aman Jr., dean of the IU School of Law -- Bloomington, "Professor Smith's support of IU and his devotion to it have been a central focus of his adult life." Smith, he says, "is someone who never says ‘no' when Indiana University is involved."
Andrew Jacobs Jr. has been a Marine, a police officer, a lawyer, a state legislator, a member of Congress, an author, and a college teacher. When asked to describe him, his friends call him a crusader, a nonconformist, a wit--and a kind and civil man.
Jacobs graduated from Shortridge High School in Indianapolis then joined the U.S. Marine Corps and fought in Korea. He returned home and returned to school, graduating from Indiana University in 1954 and from IU Law School in Indianapolis in 1958. "Andy always has been a crusader" says IU Trustee Robert H. McKinney. "While working as a police officer in the sheriff's department and attending law school, he suggested a change in railroad crossings that virtually eliminated crossing accidents in Marion County." Jacobs took that crusading spirit to the Indiana House of Representatives, where he served from 1959 to 1964, and on to Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. During his 15 terms in the U.S. House, he served on the House Ways and Means Committee, chairing both the Medicare and Social Security subcommittees. His crusades on the Hill were many and varied. He helped write the 1965 Voting Rights Act. "He put forward year after year with unyielding determination a plan for a national preschool program so all children would enter kindergarten prepare to learn," McKinney recalled. Jacobs sponsored laws that made Father's Day a legal holiday and that designated smoking sections on airplanes.
"Andy also courageously stood up against those calling for further involvement in the tragic Vietnam War, using insights undoubtedly gained during his own participation in a foreign war," says Ralph Gray, IUPUI professor emeritus of history. In 1976, Jacobs authored the "Payment Book Amendment" to require a balanced budget and mandatory retirement of the national debt. He reintroduced it in every Congress. He fought to end Political Action Committees (PACs), spent little on his campaigns, and turned back part of every pay check to the U.S. Treasury.
In 1973 Jacobs wrote The Powell Affair: Freedom Minus One, telling the story of Adam Clayton Powell's ouster from Congress. Ralph Gray describes the book as "one of the few historical accounts ever written by any of Indiana's major political figures."
When Jacobs left the House in ‘96, he used his farewell remarks to admonish those on both sides of the aisle: "There is so much good in the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us that it hardly becomes any of us to say very much about the rest of us."
Jacobs currently lectures in the School of Liberal Arts, and he is as popular on the IUPUI campus as he was with the electorate. "Students have gone out of their way to stop by my office for no reason that to say how much they are enjoying a class they are taking from Andy Jacobs," says William Blomquist, associate professor and chair of the Department of Political Science. "Andy brings the same talents and enthusiasm to the classroom that he brought to his forms of public service."
"Many will remember Andy for his nonconformity and wit; many others will remember him for his kind, civil manner," IU Trustee James T. Morris said. "He is the most highly principled lawmaker I know."
As a boy in Indianapolis, David Wolf dreamed of walking in space. On his journey to that goal, he graduated from North Central High School in 1974, then earned his engineering degree from Purdue University in 1978 and his medical degree from Indiana University in 1982. Today, as a physician, an engineer, an inventor, and an astronaut, he is fulfilling his dream and shaping the future.
IUPUI Chancellor Gerald Bepko notes that Wolf was shaping the future even when he was in school. "David Wolf was ahead of his time in recognizing the emergence of an important new direction in scientific study. He earned a degree in electrical engineering at Purdue and then combined that background with the study of medicine at IU, something we have now established, in partnership with Purdue, as a new doctoral program in biomedical engineering."
Wolf worked at the Indianapolis Center for Advanced Research from 1980 until 1983, researching medical imaging systems. He has been an inventor ever since, securing eleven U.S. patents and developing the American Flight Echocardiograph for investigating heart physiology in micro gravity.
After completing his medical internship in 1983 at Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis, Wolf became a flight surgeon, undergoing primary training at Brooks Air Force base in San Antonio, Texas. Also in 1983, Wolf joined NASA as a scientist. He became an astronaut eight years later.
His first space flight was in 1993, aboard the shuttle Columbia, on a 14-day life science and medical research mission. Wolf is perhaps best known for his 128-day stay on the Russian space station Mir, a stay that began in September of last year. He made a piece of political history in November 1997 when he cast the first vote from space via e-mail. He visited with relatives on Thanksgiving during the first Earth-to-space family videoconference, which used the Virtual Indiana Classroom Network.
While on Mir, Wolf communicated regularly with students at his alma mater, North Central, and other interested young people via e-mail. In answer to one Internet question, Wolf revealed not only that he frequently slept on the ceiling in space, but also that space had captivated his subconscious mind. "After about two months of being in space, my dreams were all in zero gravity also," he typed, ". . . the same dreams I typically have on Earth, you know, didn't do your homework, too late to drop the class, that kind of thing, but everybody's floating around in space or without gravity." Earlier this year, on January 14, he fulfilled his boyhood dream and walked in space.
For David Wolf, space is more than a field of dreams. It is also an arena for scientific investigation. His actual experiences with weightless are being studied and added to our data about the human physiological response to space. During the Columbia flight, the crew explored the cardiovascular, skeletal, and metabolic systems to reveal fundamental aspects of human physiology that are normally masked by gravity. Wolf won NASA's Exceptional Engineering Achievement Medal in 1990 and was named NASA's inventor of the year in 1992. He has published a total of 40 technical papers and has 20 Space Act Awards for three-dimensional tissue engineering technologies.
David Wolf continues to dream of the future-and to shape it-in his job as chief engineer for design of the Space Station medical facility. Joseph Rothberg, NASA's associate administrator for space flight, said, "Dr. Wolf's leadership, personal commitment, and dedication to the field of space exploration will have a lasting impact on the progress and direction of the nation's space program."
A native of Kokomo, Hillis graduated from Culver Military Academy before entering the Army. He served in the European theater during World War II, ending the war as a first lieutenant. He retired from reserve infantry duty with the rank of captain in 1954. After the war, he attended Indiana University, earning a bachelor of science degree in 1949 and a law degree in 1952. He then began practicing law in Kokomo, where he was active in the community from the beginning. "No civic, church, or governmental activity was beyond his reach," recalled G. Richard Ellis, a fellow Kokomo lawyer. "Aiding in fund-raising for charitable causes continually claimed his time and effort." Among the organization he has helped are the United Way, the YMCA, the YWCA, the Salvation Army, and United Way.
He made his first foray into politics as a Republican when he was elected to begin his first term in the Indiana House of Representatives in 1967. He stayed with the state legislature until 1971, when he began his service in the United States House. There he embraced the cause of military and veterans affairs. Among his committee assignments were the Veterans Affairs and Armed Services Committees, where he worked with Representative G. V. Montgomery of Mississippi. "He was an excellent legislator," Montgomery recalled, "and would travel out to different areas of the country to inspect military bases as well as visit veterans hospitals and facilities."
Former Indiana Governor and U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Otis Bowen recalls Hillis's time in Congress: "Elwood was a soft-spoken polite gentleman. He knew both sides of issues and was effective in his efforts for the side he felt was right to prevail."
Hillis won great respect in Washington. "His service in Congress was marked by high dedication, intelligence, and a tremendous capacity for hard work and innovation," says U.S. Representative John Myers. "He represented Indiana during some very tumultuous times for our nation and our state, including Vietnam, Watergate, and beyond. His colleagues not only looked up to and respected him, but there was not anyone who did not genuinely like Bud Hillis."
One of Hillis's legislative causes was an effort to limit terms of service in both houses of Congress. And although he was popular in his district, he voluntarily stepped down in 1987 after serving eight terms.
Back in Kokomo, the longtime member of the IUK Board of Advisors became even more involved. As outreach coordinator for the IUK Library Campaign, he helped to raise more than $2 million for the school. He has also been president of the Howard County Alumni Club, a member of the IU President's Council, the Well House Society, and the Campaign Council. He received IU's Distinguished Alumni Service Award in 1982, and he was voted an Academy of Law Alumni Fellow of the IU School of Law in 1996. He shared the IUK Chancellor's Award for Commitment to Higher Education with his wife, Carol Hillis, in 1993. Those causes that Hillis embraces are strengthened by his efforts. In the words of Richard L. Ardrey, IUK library director: "Congressman Hillis's entire career has been filled with distinction and service to his city, state, and country."
Biographical sketches written by IU Publications
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