LAURELS

Charles Sawyers, a physician/scientist at the Jonsson Cancer Center, was named an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, one of the nation's highest honors given to medical researchers. Renowned for his achievements in leukemia and prostate cancer research, he was selected as one of 12 winners following a yearlong competition.... Leena Peltonen, Gordon and Virginia MacDonald Distinguished Chair in Human Genetics, is the winner of the 2002 International Federation of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine/Abbott Award for her significant contributions to molecular diagnostics. The award recognizes a scientist's unique contributions to the promotion and understanding of molecular biology.

APPLAUSE

Chon A. Noriega, professor of film and television and associate director of the Chicano Studies Research Center, has been appointed director of the center, effective July 1. He is editor of nine books dealing with Latino media, performance and visual art and, since 1996, has been editor of Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies.... John N. Hawkins, professor of education, has been appointed director of the Center for International and Development Education in the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies. The center, composed of faculty, staff, students and graduates, combines the study of theory with practical management of educational programs....

Gary Gitnick, professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Digestive Diseases, was elected president of the Medical Board of California. Gov. Gray Davis initially appointed Gitnick as a member of the board in April 2000.

NOTEWORTHY

The UCLA Alumni Association, at its 57th annual awards ceremony, honored Nelly Amador as UCLA's Outstanding Graduate Student. She is the first person in university history to have received this award, as well as the Outstanding Senior award (in 1996). She recently earned her Ph.D. in neuroscience and is now a third-year medical student. This year's Outstanding Senior award recipients are Gauree Gupta, Jared Seltzer and Bethelwel Wilson.

IN MEMORIAM

Rogers Albritton, 78, one of the most admired philosophers of his generation and a member of UCLA's faculty from 1973 until his retirement in 1991, died May 21 of pneumonia at UCLA Medical Center. He had suffered from emphysema for many years.

Albritton's philosophical interests covered an unusually wide range of fields, including ancient philosophy, philosophy of mind, free will, skepticism, metaphysics and the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. For a university professor, Albritton was highly unusual in that he published very rarely, just a few times in more than 35 years.

"Albritton advocated no particular philosophical doctrines; he just wandered through the world coming across philosophical knots, untying them and moving on without leaving a manual on how he did it," said Philosophy Professor David Kaplan. "He also uncovered knots in places where philosophers had thought there were none. His high position in philosophy is based on the sheer power of his thought."

Born in Columbus, Ohio, Albritton attended St. John's College in Annapolis in 1940. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps, attaining the rank of sergeant. In 1945, he returned to St. John's and completed his bachelor's degree, writing his senior thesis defending lyric poetry from logical positivism. In 1955, he earned his Ph.D. from Princeton University and taught philosophy at Cornell before joining Harvard's faculty in 1956. He chaired Harvard's philosophy department from 1963 to 1970. He came to UCLA in 1972 on a one-'year experimental basis and chaired UCLA's philosophy department from 1979 to 1981. He was president of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association in 1984-'85.

Albritton was legendary for his love of discussing philosophy throughout the night and sometimes into the morning. A former graduate student recalled an 11-'hour discussion with Albritton, and said, "I can't think of any other philosopher, living or dead, I would rather bounce ideas off of; one conversation with Rogers can illuminate a philosophical problem to such an extent that everything I've thought about it before seems irrelevant."

The undergraduate and graduate courses he taught at UCLA included history of Greek philosophy, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, Wittgenstein and Descartes. He continued to teach into the mid-'1990s, even after he retired.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests contributions to the UCLA Foundation/ Rogers Albritton Memorial Fund with proceeds to benefit the philosophy department's reading room: UCLA, College of Letters and Science Development, 1332 Murphy Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095-'1413.

Henrik Birnbaum, 76, professor emeritus of Slavic languages and literatures, died on April 29 in Santa Monica after a long illness. He was an internationally renowned scholar in the field of comparative Slavic linguistics, which he taught at UCLA for 40 years. Born in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland) in 1925, he moved with his family to Sweden in 1939 to escape Nazi persecution. He earned his doctorate in 1958 at Stockholm University, where he taught for two years before coming to the U.S. as a visiting lecturer at Harvard University. He was soon recruited by UCLA, where he served twice as the chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and for 10 years as the director of the Center for Russian and East European Studies. He began publishing while still a student in the late '40s; by the time he had retired, his bibliography ran to nearly 400 items, including some 20 major books and book-'length monographs. He received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies, and was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Shirley Hawkins, 77, former head of the Theater Arts Library, died in Westwood on May 25 after a yearlong struggle with cancer. Born in Onslow, Iowa, in 1925, she spent her early years in Wisconsin and moved to Santa Monica, Calif., just before America's entrance into World War II. During the war, she worked for Douglas Aircraft Company. She worked for many years in the UCLA Library system, serving as head of the Theater Arts Library. During this time she assisted her first husband, Professor Mantle Hood, in developing UCLA's pioneering program in ethnomusicology. She also donated the Colin McPhee collection of music, photographs, film and writing from the early period of the study of Bali by such friends as McPhee and Margaret Mead. She later worked with her second husband, Professor Richard C. Hawkins, in setting up the UCLA Ethnographic Film Program, assisting in making films in Chile, Uganda and China. After leaving UCLA, she established a company for designing, manufacturing and distributing her "WoodGoods" line of educational preschool toys.

Donald Sawyer, 72, the public-'address announcer known as "the voice of Pauley Pavilion," died on March 23 at UCLA Medical Center after a long battle with cancer. He graduated from UCLA in 1956 with a B.A. in history and worked at the university from 1955 to 1991 in various capacities. He was a working basketball official for more than 38 years, from 1960 to 1998, and served as an instructor, instructional chairman and twice as president of the Southern California Basketball Officials Association. During the 1964-'65 UCLA basketball season, Athletic Director J.D. Morgan appointed Sawyer to be the varsity public-'address announcer, and he began announcing that year in the Los Angeles Sports Arena. The following year, Pauley Pavilion opened and Dick Enberg dubbed him "Don Sawyer, the voice of Pauley Pavilion." From 1964 to 1992, he never missed a game at the microphone. In 1988, Athletic Director Pete Dalis appointed Sawyer to be the public-'address announcer at the Rose Bowl for UCLA football games. He announced those games until 1991. During his last nine years, he was the fiscal officer for the College of Fine Arts. He retired from UCLA in 1991 and announced his last UCLA basketball game on March 14, 1992.