Last modified: Wednesday, October 5, 2011
IU's College of Arts and Sciences to honor four alumni and a faculty member
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Oct. 5, 2011
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Indiana University's College of Arts and Sciences will honor four alumni and the 2011 Distinguished Faculty Award recipient at its annual recognition banquet on Friday, Oct. 21. Three alumni will receive the College's 2011 Distinguished Alumni Award and a fourth will receive its Outstanding Young Alumni Award.
Ellen Ketterson, Distinguished Professor of biology and gender studies, has been chosen to receive the 2011 Distinguished Faculty Award. Ketterson also is affiliated with the Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior and the Kinsey Institute for Research on Sex, Gender and Reproduction.
The three recipients of the College's 2011 Distinguished Alumni Award are:
- Donald M. Fehr, B.A., Political Science, 1970, Executive Director, National Hockey League Players Association (NHLPA)
- Carolyn K. Reidy, M.A., English, 1974, Ph.D. English, 1982, President and CEO of Simon and Schuster Inc.
- Adam Robinson Jr., B.A., Political Science, 1972, Surgeon General and Chief of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, U.S. Navy
Erin Patrick, who earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in French and political science in 1998, will receive the Outstanding Young Alumni Award. Patrick is the senior program officer for the Fuel and Firewood Initiative of the Women's Refugee Commission.
Donald M. Fehr
Fehr received his NHLPA appointment last December, following 26 years as the executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA). As executive director, Fehr successfully challenged the owner's collusion of the late 1980s, securing $280 million in damages for the players. He also shepherded the MLBPA through its strike in 1994 and the subsequent World Series cancellation.
Reidy enrolled at IU with the expectation of working in academia. She explored the writer-reader relationship as a doctoral candidate in the Department of English. She took an entry-level job in the rights department at Random House in 1976 and fell in love with the business. "The habits of mind that I learned at Indiana University have really been of great help to me. The basic role of a publisher is still to help authors find their audience, which goes back to the writer-reader relationship I studied at IU," Reidy said.
A native of Louisville, Adam Robinson majored in political science and attended the IU School of Medicine on a military scholarship. His residency was at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. "At the end of my residency I was pretty much hooked on the Navy," he said. In addition to the College's Distinguished Alumni Award, this year he is also receiving IU's Distinguished Alumni Service Award.
Ketterson has been studying a songbird called the dark-eyed junco for more than 25 years. Through her experiments in "phenotypic engineering" -- a term she coined -- she has made major contributions to evolutionary biology by demonstrating how testosterone affects fitness in male juncos. Ketterson is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
She has received continuous funding from the National Science Foundation for more than 30 years, including an OPUS (Opportunities for Promoting Understanding through Synthesis) grant that will enable her to turn her body of work into a book. She has published more than 130 papers and served in an editorial capacity for all the major journals in her field. She also co-founded the Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior at IU and received career achievement awards from the Animal Behavior Society and the American Ornithologists Union.
Erin Patrick
Patrick works with aid agencies, advocacy organizations and policy makers toward the inclusion of cooking fuel in humanitarian aid supplies. Patrick has been researching firewood collection and use in displaced persons' camps in Africa, Haiti, Nepal and Thailand. She has developed a set of policy guidelines for the humanitarian system to protect the health and safety of displaced people as well as the natural environment surrounding refugee camps. She wrote the groundbreaking 2005 report "Beyond Firewood: Fuel Alternatives and Protection Strategies for Displaced Women and Girls," which has brought the issue growing recognition.
The College Alumni Board will hold its annual business meeting on Saturday, Oct. 22, at 8:30 a.m. in the second-floor Conference Room of the Von Lee, located at 517 E. Kirkwood Ave. All members of the College of Arts and Sciences Alumni Association are invited to attend.
