UCLA neurosurgeon and neuroscientist Itzhak Fried, an international leader in the study of brain activity and the treatment of epilepsy, has been named a Fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science for his contributions to understanding the physiology of human cognition. Co-director of the Seizure Disorder Center, Fried is an associate professor of neurosurgery and psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences and director of epilepsy surgery in the Division of Neurosurgery.

Walter J. Karplus, interim dean of the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, died Nov. 11 after a long battle with cancer. He was 74. Karplus joined the faculty in 1955 and chaired the computer science department from 1972 until 1979. He headed the Computer Simulation Laboratory and headed the Center for Experimental Computer Science for many years. He successfully employed virtual reality to allow surgeons to observe how blood flows through aneurysms in the human brain and used virtual audio to sort out critical data from the cacophony of voices in NASA's mission control room. Looking back on his long career, he told colleagues recently that it wasn't the contracts he brought in, books he'd written or people he'd met in Washington, D.C., that he remembered. "It's the 35 Ph.D.s I helped produce, the students whose lives I changed," he said. A memorial service will be held at 3 p.m. on Nov. 25 in the James West Alumni Center.

Mitzi Myers, an international authority on children's literature and a longtime lecturer in the UCLA Writing Programs and English Department, died Nov. 5 in Anaheim Hills of complications from pneumonia contracted in the aftermath of a fire last year at her Fullerton home. She was 62. Myers wrote more than 75 scholarly articles and book reviews and presented papers at scores of scholarly conferences. She was an editor of the forthcoming "Norton Anthology of Children's Literature" and contributed entries on children's literature to the "Encyclopedia Americana" and the "Cambridge Companion to Children's Literature." In 1995, she co-edited a special edition of Children's Literature, the field's leading scholarly journal.

David Stephen Sigman, 62, professor of chemistry and biological chemistry, who illuminated the molecular mechanisms by which enzymes catalyze biological reactions, died Nov. 11 after battling brain cancer. He published more than 130 research papers, was editor of the highly respected reference series "The Enzymes" and taught generations of students how chemical reactions make life possible. "David will be remembered as a large part of the collegial glue that held our biomedical community together," said colleague Steven Clarke, director of the Molecular Biology Institute, which Sigman helped found. Memorial contributions may be sent to the UCLA Foundation/David Sigman Memorial Fund in care of Bo Tendis, Molecular Biology Institute, UCLA Boyer Hall, Los Angeles,CA 90095-1570.