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HOORAY

The Israeli Center for Third Sector Research at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev presented Social Welfare Professor Yeheskel “Zeke” Hasenfeld with the Award for Innovation in Third Sector Research. He was cited for contributing to organizational theory and the understanding of human and social-service delivery systems.... Roman Koropeckyj, associate professor of Slavic languages and literatures, received a 2004 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) fellowship for his research topic, “A Biography of Polish Poet Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855).” Also awarded an NEH fellowship was Kenneth Reinhard, associate professor of English and director of the Center for Jewish Studies, for his research topic, “The Ethics of the Neighbor.” ... Robert Stevenson, professor emeritus of musicology, was presented with the Constantine Panunzio Distinguished Emeriti Award, given annually by the University of California to an emeritus professor of exceptional standing. The award honors Stevenson’s continued work in American, Iberian and Latin American music from the Renaissance to the present day.... Hillel Laks, professor and chief of cardiothoracic surgery and director of UCLA Medical Center’s Heart, Lung and Heart-Lung Transplant Programs, won the 2004 Medical Honoree Award at Camp del Corazon’s Gala del Sol event last month. The award recognizes an individual who focuses his/her work on pediatric cardiology and/or congenital heart disease.

SMASHING

Barbara J. Nelson, professor and dean of the School of Public Policy and Social Research, will receive the Harry Scoville Award for Academic Excellence from the Los Angeles Metropolitan Chapter of the American Society of Public Administration. The award is presented to an individual who has made a significant contribution to public administration through teaching, research, writing and related activities.... Gregg C. Fonarow, Eliot Corday Chair in Cardiovascular Medicine and Science, received the 2004 Award of Meritorious Achievement from the American Heart Association (AHA) for his formative and continuing work with a national AHA program called “Get With the Guidelines.” The program sets a new standard for cardiac care that improves treatment for patients hospitalized with coronary artery disease and cuts subsequent heart attacks by half.

IN MEMORIAM

Rosemary Park Anastos, former UCLA vice chancellor, died April 17 at her home in Los Angeles. She was 97.

Born in Andover, Mass., Anastos earned a bachelor’s degree in German from Radcliffe College and her Ph.D. from the University of Cologne. She joined Connecticut College in 1935 as an instructor in German and served as academic dean before being tapped as president in 1946. When Anastos left in 1962 to become president of Barnard, she had just completed the Connecticut College’s first real capital campaign ­ a $3.1 million effort that celebrated the college’s 50th anniversary.

In 1967, Anastos was appointed vice chancellor at UCLA, becoming the first female to obtain the position. “She was a strong supporter of women’s education, speaking and writing throughout her career on education and the role of women, among other subjects,” said UCLA Chancellor Albert Carnsale. “As the first female vice chancellor at UCLA and in the University of California system, Anastos forged new pathways for other women aspiring to leadership roles on our campus and far beyond.”

She retired from UCLA as professor emeritus of education in 1974, but remained active in higher education throughout her retirement. In 1976-1977, she traveled the country as a Phi Beta Kappa lecturer, speaking on educational administration, the position of women in the university, the future of the liberal arts and the history of education. In 1980, she co-founded the Plato Society of UCLA, and participated in the organization's weekly discussions until shortly before her death.

During her 15-year tenure as president of Connecticut College, from 1947 to 1962, Anastos oversaw the completion of numerous campus buildings, including the College Center at Crozier-Williams, laid the groundwork for the college’s 1969 transition to co-education, and helped bring the American Dance Festival to campus.

The first woman to serve on the University of Notre Dame Board of Trustees, Anastos advised Notre Dame on becoming a coeducational institution. The Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, former president of Notre Dame, said that Anastos was one of the most visible leaders in higher education, and especially in higher education for women. “If you listed the 10 best women you met in your life, she’d be one of them,” Hesburgh said.

Anastos was the author of three books and numerous articles and served during her retirement years as a contributing editor to Change magazine, a bi-monthly publication of the American Association for Higher Education. She received honorary degrees from 25 institutions, including Yale University, Columbia University and New York University.

Anastos was married to Milton V. Anastos, an internationally known scholar of Byzantine history and professor emeritus of history and Byzantine Greek at UCLA. He died in 1997.

Andreas Tietze, professor emeritus of Turkish in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, died of a cerebral hemorrhage on Dec. 22. He was 90.

Tietze was a member of the department from 1958 to 1973, chair 1965-70, and subsequently occupant of the chair in Turcology at the Institute for Oriental Studies, University of Vienna, Austria, 1973-1984.

A world-renowned Turcologist and one of the founders of Turkic studies in the United States, Tietze was best known for his contributions to Turkish lexicography, his work on Turkish riddles and Turkish Karagoz (Blackeye) plays, his editions and translations of Ottoman works, and his founding and editorship of an annual, multilingual bibliography covering all aspects of Turkish and Ottoman life. He was also a translator of modern fiction: from German to Turkish, from Turkish to German, and from Azerbaijani to Turkish.

His friends, colleagues, and former students in both the U.S. and Europe, remember him affectionately for his encyclopedic knowledge, high standards, diligence, modesty, accessibility and willingness to offer his assistance with their problems.

Tietze was born on April 26, 1914 in Vienna, the son of prominent art historians Hans Tietze and Erica Conrad-Tietze. He studied history and languages at the University of Vienna from 1932 to 1937, spent one semester at the Sorbonne in 1933, and received his doctorate from the former institution in 1937. A diary of two trips he made to Anatolia in 1936-37, kept by one of his companions, a photocopy of which is now in the archives of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, remains one of perhaps only two firsthand accounts by foreign visitors of life in those early days of the Turkish Republic as lived in the countryside outside of
Istanbul and Ankara ( Unsere Anatolienreise, and Die Zweite Anatolienreise).

With the Nazi advance in Europe, Tietze moved to Istanbul in 1937, joining many other prominent German and Austrian émigré scholars who found refuge in Turkey and employment at Istanbul University. There he was a lecturer in German from 1938 to 1952, and a lecturer in English from 1953 to 1958. In addition to his teaching, he was an editor of a series of 16 titles, Istanbuler Schriften, that included his first reader for foreign students of Turkish, Türkisches Lesebuch für Auslaender (Istanbul, 1943), written jointly with S. Lisie.

He was also active in the field of folklore as co-editor and contributing translator on the Orientalist Hellmut Ritter’s monumental study of the Blackeye shadow puppet theater, Karagöz: türkische Schattenspiele (3 vols, Hanover, 1924-1953). It was at this time too that he became deeply involved in lexicography. He prepared a Turkish-German dictionary (Türkçe-Almanca Sözlügü, ?1942) with Ritter, and from 1946 to 1958 he was director of the American Board Publication Office project to revise the original Redhouse English-Turkish Dictionary of 1861 and the companion Redhouse Turkish-English Dictionary of 1890. Both works, now further updated, remain indispensable to students of Turkish.

In 1958 Tietze became associate professor of Turkish and Persian at UCLA, one of the first appointments in the field of Near Eastern Languages at the university; in 1960 he became professor of Turkish. To meet the needs of his students, he published two readers sorely needed in those years when instructional materials, especially beyond the elementary level, were in short supply, Turkish Literary Reader and Advanced Turkish Reader: Texts from the Social Sciences and Related Fields (Indiana University, 1963 and 1973 respectively). Both works are still used by students today.

While at UCLA Tietze authored numerous articles and continued his research on folklore. Comparing the oldest collection of Turkish riddles, those found in a section of the 14th-century document known as the Codex Cumanicus, with related riddles from other Turkic sources, he described a new vision of this early work in The Koman Riddles and Turkic Folklore
(University of California Press, 1966).

In recognition of his outstanding qualities as a teacher, he received a Distinguished Teaching Award in 1971. Throughout his tenure at UCLA Tietze was instrumental in building up the holdings of Turkish and Ottoman books and manuscripts at the University Research Library (now the Young Research Library), making it the home of one of the largest collections of such works in the U.S. and the largest collection in the West.

After spending the academic year 1971 as a visiting professor in the Institute for Oriental Studies at the University of Vienna, Tietze returned there in 1973 to occupy the chair in Turcology. In the same year he assumed the editorship of the journal Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, a leading European journal for Near Eastern Studies.

Following his retirement in 1984, Tietze continued to teach at the University of Vienna as well as at Bosphorus University in Istanbul. In 1991 he published an annotated transcription of what appears to have been the first original novel written in Turkish, Vartan Pasha’s Akabi Hikayesi
of 1851, a work little known and without influence because it was printed in the Armenian characters for Armenian readers who spoke Turkish but had difficulty with the Arabic script at that time used for Turkish.

In the final years of his life Tietze also embarked on perhaps his major project: a historical and etymological dictionary of the Turkish of Turkey (Tarihi ve Etimolojik Türkiye Türkçesi Lugatž). He lived to see the publication of only the first volume [A-E] of the projected seven-volume work (Simurg Istanbul-Vienna, 2002), but additional letters were ready for publication. Over a long productive life Tietze received numerous awards for his service to the field, including four volumes in his honor (festschriften). He will be remembered by the students he inspired and through his many enduring contributions to Turcology. May those who honor his memory see his final project to a successful conclusion.

He was buried on Jan. 8, 2004 in the 18th regional municipal cemetery of Vienna. He is survived by his wife, the former Süheyla Uyar, and four children, Phyllis, Denise, Noor, and Ben.

Roy Walford, professor emeritus of pathology and laboratory medicine, died on April 27 due to respiratory failure and complications from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s. He was 79.

Walford joined the department of pathology and laboratory medicine at the UCLA School of Medicine in 1966. His research passion was the biology of aging. He published more than 330 scientific papers on the subject. His eight books included “The Immunologic Theory of Aging,” with Rick Weindruch (1969); “The Retardation of Aging and Disease by Dietary Restriction” (1988); and popular science books about aging, including “Beyond the 120-Year Diet” (2000).

From 1991 to1993, Walford served as crew physician for the Biosphere 2 project. He and the rest of the eight-member crew were sealed for two years in a closed ecological system near Tucson, Ariz. The group intended to grow, harvest and process all of their own food.

Early in the experiment, food supplies ran low. With the crew’s agreement, Walford conducted the first human model of a calorie-restricted diet, which he earlier had observed slowed aging and increased lifespan in laboratory mice and other animals.

Demonstrating numerous human physiological changes associated with lifespan extension, Walford's findings were widely reported by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Journal of Gerontology, Toxicological Sciences and others.

In 1993 Walford returned part time to academic research at UCLA. Before his death, he was working on an invited review with Weindruch, his frequent collaborator, on calorie restriction and aging for the prestigious Annual Review of Nutrition.

In 1947, as a medical student at the University of Chicago, Walford and his friend Albert Hibbs, a rocket scientist, developed a statistical system for predicting trends in roulette wheels. They applied this system in Las Vegas and Reno to transform $200 they’d borrowed into $42,000. Their exploits landed them on the cover of Life magazine, while the casinos learned to switch roulette wheels frequently. With their winnings, the pair bought a 40-foot sailboat and roamed the Caribbean islands collecting scientific specimens for a year.

Walford served two years in the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War after completing an internship at Gorgas Memorial Hospital in Panama and a residency at the Veterans’ Affairs Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System. He received his medical degree at the University of Chicago in 1948, following pre-medical studies at the California Institute of Technology.

Prior to joining UCLA, Walford completed sabbaticals in Germany at the Max Planck Institute for Immunology Biology, in France in the laboratory of Nobel Prize winner Jean Dausset and in various parts of India.

Walford received many honors for his achievements. Experimental Gerontology will publish a commemorative edition in his honor this spring. Other honors include the Kleemeier Award from the Gerontological Society of America, the Henderson Award from the American Geriatrics Society, the Distinguished Research Award from the American Aging Association, the Infinity Award from the American Academy for Anti-Aging Medicine and the IPSEN Foundation’s Longevity Prize in 1998.

Walford was born June 29, 1924, in San Diego. He is survived by his former wife, Martha Schwalb of Los Angeles; his daughter and research colleague, Lisa Walford of Los Angeles; his sons Morgan Walford of San Francisco and Peter Walford of Amsterdam; and two granddaughters.

Memorial services will take place in May at the Chelsea Hotel in New York City, and at Biosphere 2 in Tucson. The family requests that donations be made to the Roy Walford Endowed Lectureship, c/o the UCLA Office of Medical Sciences Development, 10945 Le Conte Ave., Suite 3132, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1784. Call Alan Han at (310) 825-1546 for more information.