The Center for Advanced Study continues in its mission to serve the intellectual core of our campus by providing our academic community with opportunities for top-flight interdisciplinary scholarship and interactions. This brochure describes the people who make up the Center, as well as projects completed and projects to come.
CAS Professors are at the heart of the Center community. You undoubtedly remember the exhilarating moments earlier in the year when three CAS Professors won awards of extraordinary honor: Carl Woese, the Crafoord Prize in Biosciences; Paul Lauterbur, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine; and Tony Leggett, the Nobel Prize in Physics. These awards, and others garnered by CAS Professors, provide a certain fundamental recognition that the promise of intense intellectual effort has been fulfilled, and has resulted in substantial benefit to our human civilization.
It is in this regard, the future promise, that I am deeply troubled that our release-time program for tenured and untenured faculty continues to suffer from the ongoing campus budget crisis. Once again this year we were faced with more fundable projects than our budget would allow. The caliber of those projects was so high, however, that the Vice-Chancellor for Research and the Provost granted us some additional funding for this year's competition. I thank them for their generous support of our very best tenured and untenured faculty.
Another area of future promise, our CAS John Bardeen Graduate Scholars Program, we have suspended indefinitely, again for budgetary reasons. This program provided an invaluable opportunity for our graduate students to participate in an interdisciplinary faculty seminar and to investigate in depth the central issues of our initiatives. The program will remain suspended until a recurring source of funding can be identified. Please contact the Center if you would like to make a contribution to a fund for this unique and worthwhile program.
Our new initiative is "The Memory Project: An Interdisciplinary Study of Memory and the Construction of Identity and Culture." As with all of our special initiatives, this one features a faculty and graduate student seminar along with a public events series. Our first speaker is Elizabeth Loftus, recently elected to the National Academy of Sciences, who will address the issue of eyewitness testimony and the fidelity of memory. I have been impressed by Loftus’s presentations in the past and expect another remarkable performance from her. Please consult our website for updated information about this and other events. I am pleased as well to announce that my good friend and colleague Karl Hess (Electrical and Computer Engineering) will deliver the CAS Fourteenth Annual Lecture.
William T. Greenough
