KUDOS

James Friedman, manager of the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s Research and Study Center, was appointed head of commercial development for the archive. He is responsible for developing projects that generate revenue for the archive’s programs and services.... The American Geriatrics Society created an award named after David H. Solomon, professor emeritus in the School of Medicine’s Division of Geriatrics. The David H. Solomon Distinguished Public Service Award will recognize public service that improves the health and well-being of older people.... I.H. (Mel) Suffet, a faculty member in the Environmental Science and Engineering Program in the School of Public Health, received the A.P. Black Research Award from the American Water Works Association. The award distinguishes outstanding research contributions made to water science and to the drinking water supply industry.... Brad Zebrack, a research fellow at the Jonsson Cancer Center and in the Department of Pediatrics, won the 2002 Oncology Social Worker Research Award from the Association of Oncology Social Work. The award honored his outstanding leadership and research on long-term quality of life in adults who had cancer as children.

GRANTS

The NIH has given a $500,000 equipment grant to Professor-in-Residence Kym Faull (left) and his colleagues Julian Whitelegge, Richard Stevens and Ken Conklin in the Pasarow Mass Spectrometry Laboratory to purchase a new mass spectrometer for proteomics research. With this latest award, the four have received $1.6 million in equipment funds from the NIH and NSF to upgrade the mass spectrometers in their facility, which is jointly supported by the Neuropsychiatric Institute and the departments of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and Chemistry and Biochemistry.... The National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) granted the UCLA Medical Group a two-year Certification for Credentialing and Recredentialing, making it one of a handful of U.S. medical groups to receive such an honor. NCQA evaluates clinical and administrative systems in order to improve health care for its members.

IN MEMORIAM

Walden P. Boyle, a founder of the UCLA Department of Theater Arts, died Oct. 15 of complications from surgery at UCLA Medical Center. He was 94.

Born in Winside, Neb., he earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of Oregon and served as a drama instructor there. He also earned his master’s degree and doctorate at Cornell University. In 1943, Boyle joined the UCLA faculty as a lecturer in the English Department. He and another faculty member were in charge of the drama majors, who at the time reported to the English Department. They directed all the plays, occasionally built scenery and lighted productions.

After founding the Department of Theater Arts in 1947, Boyle directed its first production, “The Wanhope Building.” He also developed the department’s one-act play program, which required theater majors to write, direct and act in original plays. After 32 years of full-time academic service, in which he also served terms as department chairman, he took emeritus status in 1976.

Philip Brett, professor of musicology who was best known for his groundbreaking work on issues of gender and sexuality in music, died of cancer Oct. 16 at his Los Angeles home, one day before his 65th birthday.

Born in England, Brett wrote extensively on the music of the English Renaissance and on Benjamin Britten. He was one of the first scholars to take a frank look at gay themes in Britten’s operas and published a series of books and articles on the subject. As co-founder of the American Musicological Society’s Gay and Lesbian Study Group in 1989, he was widely regarded as the leading figure in what has since become a vibrant field of scholarly research.

Brett was born in Edwinstowe, Nottinghamshire, and earned a bachelor’s degree and doctorate from King’s College, Cambridge. After spending a year at UC Berkeley as a lecturer starting in 1962, he returned there to teach again from 1966 to 1991. In 1991, after becoming a naturalized American citizen, he joined UC Riverside’s music faculty, later becoming dean of humanities, arts and social sciences. In 2001, he joined UCLA as a professor of musicology.

Burton David Fried, a pioneering computer researcher in the aerospace industry and professor of physics, died in Palm Desert after complications from surgery on Oct. 12. He was 76.

Fried made many fundamental contributions to the study of the behavior of the fourth state of matter, known as plasmas. One of his more influential works was the analysis of a mathematical function that is widely used to describe the behavior of plasma. He was an outspoken champion of fusion as the ultimate energy source for mankind and chaired numerous national panels and committees that chartered the early development of this field. Warmly known by colleagues abroad as “Burt,” Fried traveled widely and helped bring together plasma scientists during the difficult years of the Cold War. He was one of the first American plasma physicists to travel to Japan and was instrumental in bringing young Japanese scientists to this country.

Fried was born in 1926 and grew up in Chicago. During World War II he enlisted in the Navy as a radio technician; he later completed a Ph.D. in 1952 at the University of Chicago. In 1954, he joined a fledgling company, now known as TRW, and became the director of its computer division. Fried teamed with Glen Culler to develop a pioneering online computational platform, known as the Culler-Fried system, which predated the modern-day, PC-based computational software used by scientists and engineers.

In 1965, Fried joined the faculty as a full professor in the Department of Physics, where he assembled one of the world’s leading plasma-research groups. He retired from UCLA in 1991.

Harry H.L. Kitano, a leading authority on race and ethnic relations and a professor in the departments of social welfare and sociology, died Oct. 19 of a stroke at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in West Los Angeles. He was 76.

During more than four decades at UCLA, Kitano served as co-director of UCLA’s Alcohol Research Center and twice as acting director of the Asian American Studies Center, the nation’s largest facility for such research. In 1990, he became the first recipient of the endowed chair in Japanese-American studies at UCLA, the only academic chair of its kind in the United States. He was a pioneer in community research studies of interracial marriages, juvenile delinquency, mental health and alcohol abuse in the Asian Pacific-American population.

A native of San Francisco, Kitano grew up in Chinatown, where his immigrant parents ran a hotel. After the Dec. 7, 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, his family was sent to live in a horse stall at the Santa Anita racetrack in Arcadia. After six months, they were sent to the Topaz internment camp in Utah, where they remained from 1942 to 1945.

After his release, Kitano changed his name to Harry Lee and worked briefly as a farmhand in Milwaukee. Moving to Minnesota, he played trombone with several jazz bands. He returned to the Bay Area in 1946 and, though he never finished high school because of his internment, earned degrees in sociology and social work and a Ph.D. in education and psychology at UC Berkeley. His first book, “Japanese Americans: The Emergence of a Subculture,” was published in 1969 and catapulted him to celebrity status in both the academic and public arenas.

A public memorial will be held Dec. 14 at 10:30 a.m. at the UCLA Faculty Center. Donations can be made to the Harry Kitano Scholarship Endowment/UCLA Foundation, c/o UCLA Asian American Studies Center, P.O. Box 951546, 3230 Campbell Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1546.