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NAMES AND FACES

KUDOS

Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Jennifer Jay has been chosen as one of 20 National Science Foundation-supported scientists and engineers to receive the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. The award is the highest national honor for investigators in the early stages of promising scientific careers.... Marian College awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree to Edwin S. Shneidman, professor emeritus of thanatology, at its commencement ceremony May 14. Shneidman is one of the world’s leading authorities on the study of suicide.... Charles L. Sawyers, Peter Bing Professor of Medicine, Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and director of the Prostate Cancer Program at the Jonsson Cancer Center, received the David A. Karnofsky Memorial Award from the American Society of Clinical Oncology for innovative research in oncology. He was also awarded the American Association for Cancer Research-Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award, which recognizes research that has made, or promises to soon make, notable contributions to clinical care in the field of cancer.

ACCLAIM

E. Carmack Holmes, executive director of the Center for Advanced Surgical and Interventional Therapy, has been elected to the Johns Hopkins University Society of Scholars. The society inducts former postdoctoral fellows and junior or visiting faculty at Johns Hopkins who have gained marked distinction in their fields.... Electrical Engineering Professor Eli Yablonovitch has been selected to hold the Northrop Grumman Opto-Electronics Chair in Electrical Engineering, while Computer Science Professor Deborah Estrin has been named to the Jonathan B. Postel Chair in Computer Networking.... The HeArt Project honored the Center for Community Partnerships and Franklin D. Gilliam Jr., associate vice chancellor for community partnerships, in recognition of the university’s commitment to working with Los Angeles organizations. HeArt, which sponsors innovative arts programs for teens, has received funding from the center.... Vicente Honrubia, director of the Victor Goodhill Ear Center in the Geffen School of Medicine, received the Hispanic Health Leadership Award at the National Hispanic Medical Association’s ninth annual conference, “Medical Practice for the 21st Century: Enhancing Quality Care and Health Literacy.”

IN MEMORIAM

Christopher Spencer Foote, the foremost authority on chemical reactions of singlet oxygen, died June 13 at his home in Santa Monica, Calif., from complications of brain cancer. He was 70.

A UCLA faculty member for his entire career, Foote made the groundbreaking discovery of the role of singlet oxygen — an electronically excited form of the oxygen in the air — in reactions of organic molecules caused by sunlight and ultraviolet light. Foote’s discovery, established by developing an independent chemical route to singlet oxygen, was made in 1964 while he was still an instructor at UCLA. This became the fundamental principle that led to a rich career exploring the interactions of singlet oxygen with a broad range of chemicals, ranging from DNA and other biological molecules to nanomaterials. His research led to important new findings about why molecular oxygen is both essential to life processes and is a major agent of biological damage.

“Professor Foote’s lifelong research established the enormous importance and double-edged nature of singlet oxygen and reactive oxygen species,” said Kendall Houk, professor of organic chemistry. “Chris led a research team that showed these altered forms of oxygen formed by the influence of light can be used for beneficial chemical reactions and have many natural functions in living cells — but are also responsible for many types of biological damage, including DNA reactions leading to mutations.”

Foote also influenced thousands of undergraduate students in the United States and other countries as co-author of the widely used organic chemistry textbook, “Brown and Foote,” now in its fourth edition as “Brown, Foote, and Iverson.”

Born June 5, 1935, in Hartford, Conn., Christopher Foote grew up in a family where intellectual rigor and music were highly valued. His father, William Foote, was the managing editor and columnist of the Hartford Courant; his mother was the former Dorothy Bennett, a descendant of Benjamin Silliman, the first professor of science at Yale.

Foote graduated from Kingswood School in West Hartford, Conn., and earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Yale University in 1957. The following year he spent as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Göttingen in Germany, in the laboratories of the eminent photochemist G.O. Schenk. Foote’s long-standing interests in reactive oxygen species and notable facility with languages were nurtured in that period. Foote entered Harvard University in 1958 and received his Ph.D. in 1962 for work with Nobel Laureate Robert Burns Woodward on solvolytic reactions, a major research interest of that era. The same year, he joined the UCLA faculty.

“During more than 40 years on the Westwood campus, Chris was an honored researcher and dedicated teacher, mentoring and training hundreds of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, while giving himself tirelessly to university service,” Houk said.

Foote’s 43-year academic career established him as a world leader in the field of physical organic chemistry. His earliest work focused on the effect of bond angle strain on the properties of organic molecules. He established a quantitative correlation between spectroscopic properties and reactivity well-known to chemists and named for him. Foote’s main research interest was the generation and reactions of reactive oxygen species in chemistry and biology. He was renowned as an authority on reactive oxygen species, known to biologists as “ROS,” including species such as singlet oxygen and superoxide — a form of oxygen with an excess electron. Foote produced more than 250 research papers that elegantly document discoveries on organic chemical reactions — many of which focus on how singlet oxygen, superoxide and other forms of reactive oxygen influence biology, both as natural components of the immune system and as toxins.

Foote was a leader in clarifying the complex chemistry induced by these simple but reactive molecules. His recent work on DNA damage and on the photophysical properties of the fullerenes were among the most influential discoveries from his laboratories.

Foote earned many prestigious awards for his achievements, most notably an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Leo Hendrik Baekeland Award of the American Chemical Society. In 1994, he received some of the American Chemical Society’s highest honors: the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award and the Tolman Medal of the Southern California Section of the American Chemical Society. Foote’s research was supported throughout his career by numerous grants from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health. He was highly prized as a consultant to prominent companies due to his expertise on oxidation chemistry and biology.

Foote was the chair of the Department of Chemistry from 1978-1981, providing leadership that led to the construction of the Molecular Sciences Building (completed in 1994), and served as a strong advocate in developing the department’s commitment to hiring outstanding female scientists for faculty positions.

In service to the broader UCLA community, Foote served as a member and chair of the Committee on Academic Personnel and was a member of the corresponding statewide committee for the UC system. He also served as a member of the Executive Committee of the College. In keeping with his strong interest in computer technology, he was the first chair of the university’s Information Technology Planning Board, which helped to transform educational and administrative technology policy at UCLA. He was president of the American Society for Photobiology in 1988-89 and senior editor of the respected journal Accounts of Chemical Research from 1995 until his death. He also served as elected councilor for the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

With his wife, Judith L. Smith, vice provost for undergraduate education at UCLA, Foote was a patron of the Los Angeles Opera and the Da Camera Society as well as a benefactor of the L.A. Chamber Orchestra.

In addition to his wife, Foote is survived by a sister, Mary Foote Rounsavall of Louisville, Ky.; two sons, Jonathan Trumbull Foote of Menlo Park and Thomas Ward Foote of Topanga, who is married to Florence Riobé-Foote; and a grandson, Spencer André Foote. Foote had two brothers, now deceased, William Jenkins Foote Jr. and Edward Jenkins Foote. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Christopher S. Foote Graduate Fellowship in Organic Chemistry at UCLA, and sent to: Camille Harper, UCLA College, 1309 Murphy Hall, Box 951413, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1413.

A memorial service will be held in the fall.

Ivan N. Mensh, professor emeritus in the Department of Psychiatry, died April 21 in Rockville, Md., at the age of 89.

Recognized nationally and internationally for his leadership in clinical and medical psychology, his sustained record of scholarly, professional and educational contributions, and his service to the university and society, Mensh was the first head of the Division of Medical Psychology, where he created UCLA’s Medical Psychology Training Program. A pioneer in the field of gerontology, he was one of the first to stress the importance of personality factors in assessing treatment outcome, the need for multivariant approaches to the study of psychopathology and its treatment, and the selection for medical education.

Mensh began his service with the United States Naval Reserve in 1943. “As with every association, entity or organization that he joined, he brought commitment,” said Fawzy I. Fawzy, executive vice chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences. “He was truly invested in all that he undertook.”

The Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences’ Medical Psychology Training Program will continue to benefit from the fund that Mensh and his wife, Frances, established to endow a postdoctoral fellowship in neuropsychology.

Eric Monkkonen, 62, a UCLA urban historian whose fascination with the deadliest crime led to groundbreaking analyses of 200 years of Los Angeles and New York City homicide statistics, died at his Culver City home May 30 after a 10-year battle with prostate cancer.

A professor of history and policy studies, Monkkonen was the author of several books, including “Murder in New York City,” which was published in 2001 by the University of California Press. For this work, he investigated newspaper, police and coroners’ reports dating as far back as the 1780s.

Along the way he became an expert on the characteristics of murder in America and found convincing proof that violence was endemic to American culture. “The United States has tolerated a homicide rate much higher than all of the rest of the Western world except Russia,” he told the Los Angeles Times in an unpublished interview. “Our freedoms are impinged by these high homicide rates. … Whole parts of our city are dangerous, and we all know it and we don’t go there.”

He intended to bring the same thorough analysis to the study of murder in Los Angeles, but was unable to complete the work due to his illness.

A Kansas City native who grew up in Duluth, Minn., Monkkonen was a graduate student studying urban crime at the University of Minnesota in the late 1960s when he began to develop an interest in murder. “I focused on murder in part because murder is something that can be pretty clearly studied over a long period of time,” he told the Associated Press in 2001.

After earning his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Minnesota between 1964 and 1973, he taught at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, for a few years before coming to UCLA in 1975.

Monkkonen is survived by his wife, Judy, and sons Pentti and Paavo. Donations may be sent to the UCLA Foundation – Monkkonen Fund, c/o Teofilo Ruiz, UCLA Department of History, Los Angeles, CA 90095.