Dean of the School of Dentistry and Professor No-Hee Park received a five-year grant for $1.2 million from the National Institutes of Health Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research for research on human papillomavirus genetic instability and oral cancer....The School of Public Policy and Social Research has selected its 2001-02 class of Senior Fellows. The class includes Antonio Villaraigosa, former speaker of the California Assembly; Ambassador Martha Lara, consul general of Mexico in Los Angeles; syndicated editorial cartoonist Paul Conrad; Susan Golding, former mayor of San Diego; and Matthew K. Fong, former state treasurer. Also in the class are other distinguished leaders in their fields: Theodore C. Barreaux, Anita M. Bock, Angela Evans, Judith Heumann, Matthew Miller, Dan E. Moore, Marvin J. Southard, John Y. Tateishi, Jeff Thindwa and Arturo Vargas.

John M. Dawson, a physics professor who was regarded as the father of plasma-based accelerators and computer simulation of plasmas, died in his sleep Nov. 17 at age 71. Dawson was a leading figure in the physics of high-temperature plasmas for more than four decades. He invented an isotope separation process that was used to save many lives from prostate cancer, from which he recovered in the mid-1970s. Among his many awards were the Maxwell Prize and the Aneesur Rahman Prize, the highest honors in the American Physical Society's plasma physics and computational physics divisions. Memorial scholarship fund contributions may be sent to The John Dawson Memorial Fund/UC Regents c/o Andrea Johnson, UCLA Physics Dept., Los Angeles, CA 90095-1547.

Rosslyn Gaines, an internationally respected developmental and clinical psychologist, and professor emeritus of psychiatry and psychology, died of leukemia Nov. 23 at her Brentwood home. She was 75. Gaines joined UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute in 1971. Her research centered on the cognitive and emotional development of deaf children with hearing parents, and deaf parents with hearing children. In 1982, she founded and directed UCLA's Hearing-Impaired Children, Infants and Parents' Services, which provides psychotherapy and counseling to families with a deaf child or parent. Her lifelong interest in the development of deaf children was sparked when her daughter, Katherine, lost her hearing during birth.

Moshe Perlmann, professor emeritus in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, died Sept. 7 at age 95 in New York. As a student at the University of Odessa, he was arrested for Jewish socialist activity and expelled in 1924. He went to Palestine, where he studied Arabic and Islamics at Hebrew University. After receiving his M.A. there and a Ph.D. from the University of London, he came to UCLA in 1961. He headed the Arabic program until his retirement in 1979. The heart of his scholarly interests was Islamic-Jewish-Christian polemics, and he produced critical editions and translations of three significant Arabic texts, including one by a 12th-century Jewish convert to Islam, Samau'al al-Maghribi.