Knapp House Alumni Newsletter

 

Spring 2005

 

 

Our backyard on the day of the Jan. seminar dinner, photo by Kevin Brosnan

 

Spring greetings to Knappers everywhere!  We have had a busy semester here already with art nights, seminar dinners, and house parties.   I would say it was a record number of parties with the Valentine’s Day party, Alexia’s pasta-making party, Larry’s hot-pot night and Asha’s roaring 20’s themed birthday party just in the past couple of months.  We also had our own fellows present at the seminar dinner for the first time in many years.  This has led me to wonder about the constantly evolving format of the seminar dinners.  I have heard that in the beginning, fellows always spoke at the dinners, and at some point, a switch was made to only invited speakers.  We are considering bringing back the tradition of fellows speaking, at least once or twice a year.   I would enjoy hearing from our Knapp alumni about how the seminar dinners have changed and about particularly memorable dinners.

 

As with the previous newsletter, I have assembled correspondence that I have received from our alumni, including news, updates and biographies.  I would like to remind you all that I would love to receive any other material you might want to share with this audience, like short opinion pieces or reviews.  I will continue to produce the newsletter every March and October. 

 

Let me also remind you that we will host another Knapp House Alumni Brunch and Open House this fall during Homecoming weekend (Oct. 23, 2005).  I know that many of you are already planning to attend and we look forward to seeing you back in the house.  

 

Visit us on the web at http://knapphouse.rso.wisc.edu and for alumni relations, contact me, Stacey Smith, at sdsmith4@wisc.edu.  You can also write to us at Knapp House, 130 E. Gilman St., Madison, WI, 53703.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Knapp House T-shirt Design Contest

 

A few years ago, the Knapp House produced a t-shirt bearing the house logo, shown above.  New Knappers receive the shirt upon entry and we often give the shirts as gifts to our seminar dinner speakers.  We feel that it is time to design a new t-shirt and we are turning to you for ideas.  The design should require a single color only and relate to the Knapp House in some way.  The winner will be selected by a vote among current house members. The creator of the winning design will be credited on the t-shirt and will receive a free t-shirt as a gesture of our gratitude.  Submissions may be on paper or electronic and must be received by Stacey by May 1st.  The t-shirts will be available for purchase over the web and at Knapp House events, including the next Alumni brunch. We look forward to your ideas!


 

 

News from Knappers

 

 

Mauricio Avila (Ph.D. 2004, Soil Science; mavila@mlpmaui.com) left the house last year to work on a soil renutrification project at Honolua Plantation in Maui.  John Peck (Ph.D. 2003, Physics; peck@ieee.org) visited him and to took the photo below, showing Mauricio looking, as always, dangerous with a knife.

 

 

Of the trip, John says, “I ate more pineapple in two days than I have in the last year.  Mauricio lives on a pineapple plantation.  He put up with me for three days, fed me pineapple, took me snorkeling, fed me coconut, took me biking, showed me ricin, and taught me as much soil chemistry as I know. This [picture] is on the plantation the first day I was there.  We ate that pineapple in the next five minutes.”

 

William Campbell (Ph.D. 1957; campbellwc@comcast.net), upon leaving the Knapp House, joined the Merck Institute for Therapeutic Research in Rahway, New Jersey, where he continued his studies on the treatment and control of parasitic diseases.  In 1963 he married Mary Mastin, and a year later, when Bill was on leave from Merck, they moved to England.  Bill did a post-doc stint with Professor Lawson Soulsby (now Lord Soulsby) at Cambridge University and Mary did a delivery of their daughter Jenifer.

   Their son Peter was born in the USA 1966, and later that year Bill traveled in Central and South America as an Interamerican Fellow in Tropical Medicine.  In the following year he became Director of Parasitology at the Merck research labs.

   In 1972 Bill was given a temporary assignment as Director of the Merck Sharp and Dohme Veterinary Research and Development Laboratory in Australia.  Their daughter Betsy was born there later in the year, making it three children in three countries.  Their grandchildren (two, so far) are, so to speak, native Americans.  Bill and Mary returned to New Jersey in 1973, where Bill held various positions with the Merck research organization until his retirement in 1990.

   A day after retirement, Bill took up a Research Fellowship in the Research Institute for Scientists Emeriti at Drew University, making the arc of his career extend from Madison, Wisconsin to Madison, New Jersey.  He has now completed 15 years of a very active and happy retirement in the academic world – mentoring students in his laboratory and teaching courses in parasitology and the history of biomedical science.  Along the way he has supplemented his scientific publications with a variety of poems, paintings and essays on scientific and nonscientific subjects.  In 2002 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.

   Over the years, contacts with Knapp House friends have been few but greatly treasured.  Jenifer’s first and much loved Teddy-bear was a gift from visiting Fred Firestone.  Bill went skiing in Vermont with Bill Shephard before either was married.  Later the Shephards visited the Campbells during their Cambridge sojourn, and Bill visited Gerry O’Grady in Oxford.  In May 2005 Bill and Mary will finally travel together to Madison, Wisconsin, where they especially look forward to visiting Knapp House!

 

 

Robert L. Hall (PhD 1960, Anthropology; rlhall@uic.edu) writes:

    “I lived at Knapp House 1954-1955. From there I went to Janesville as Director-Curator of the Lincoln-Tallman Museum while working on my dissertation, then to the University of South Dakota as Director of the Institute of Indian Studies, to Illinois as Curator of Anthropology of the Illinois State Museum, to Milwaukee as Associate Professor of Anthropology at Marquette University, and finally to the University of Illinois at Chicago, where I taught from 1968 to 1998 and for ten years was Chairman of the Department of Anthropology. I am now Professor Emeritus at UIC.

    I have been married to a Wisconsin alum, Barbara Mohr ('55), since 1958. We have four grown daughters (one also a Wisconsin alum) and three granddaughters living in California and Illinois. You can get an idea of what I have been doing through the past fifty years with a look at my recent book An Archaeology of the Soul: North American Indian Belief and Ritual (U. of Ill. Press, 1997) and at the festschrift papers comprising Volume 84 of The Wisconsin Archeologist (2003): "A Deep-Time Perspective: Studies in Symbols, Meaning, and the Archaeological Record. . . ."

    Life at Knapp House was a very stimulating environment, in no small part because of the variety of fields represented and the opportunities for interaction provided. “

 

Min-Hsiung Huang (Ph.D. 1996, Sociology; mhhuang@sinica.edu.tw) was a Knapp House resident from 1994-1996.  He is a research fellow at the Institute of European &

American Studies at the Academia Sinica (Taipei, Taiwan), and recently visited Madison to present a paper.  While in town, he stopped by the house and bought a whopping 7 Knapp House t-shirts!  Thanks!

 

K. David Jackson (Ph.D. 1973, Portuguese; k.jackson@yale.edu) is a professor of Portuguese, Yale University (since 1993).  Previously he was at University of Texas at Austin (1974-93).

 

Peter Mossel (Ph.D. 1984, Sociology; pmossel@verizon.net) currently lives in New York City and shares two children, Daniel (11) and Carolien (9) with his wife, Linda.

 

Kelly Musick (Ph.D. 2000, Sociology; musick@almaak.usc.edu) took a job at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles after graduating from UW in 2000.  She is still at USC -- will come up for tenure in a few years.  She recently married Dan Burke and the couple welcomed their first child, Alice Musick Burke, on January 18th, 2005. 

 

 

               Alice Musick Burke

 

 

Subra Nagarajan (Ph.D. 1989, Engineering; Subra.A.Nagarajan@seagate.com) shared these memories:

 “I graduated in '89 in Engineering with the objective of working in all parts of the US.  I started in Madison, then Minnesota, to Massachusetts, then Sunnyvale CA, and now back in MN.  I need to work in the South sometime & then to write a book about a woman in engineering. Right now I am in Seagate in Minneapolis and if I can blow my own trumphet (with kids actually learning the trumphet & saxophone) I got inducted into Seagate's Technology Hall of Fame. I met my wife Mary (UW Law school grad) & our first encounters were Knapp house dinners!!! Our favorite hangout in those days - Pickney street hideaway & of course Knapp house living room. One Favorite Knapp house memory '88:  Fellow  Knappers cheering Kirk Gibson's "one legged home run" in world series. I roomed in the room adjacent to the kitchen which saw all the traffic - enjoyed that immensely - turned into breakfast room.  Technical contribution to Knappers discussions:  Everyone knew the reason for the jagged (sinusoidal) mile long crack in frozen Mendota that would show up some years betweeen picnic point and the Union around Jan-Feb!”

 

 

Hiram Paley (Ph.D. 1959, Math; hpaley@uiuc.edu), after finishing his doctorate, left for the Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illinois, where he has remained.  In May 1998, he retired from the Math Dept at UIUC, but he still holds emeritus status there.   He shared some of his memories about the house parents during his time.

 

“Our "house parents" were a couple in English, John and Bettie Anne Doebler, both of whom received Ph. D.'s in English.  Their only child (before years later they adopted a son) was a daughter born just a few months into the academic year 1957-58.  You can imagine how many uncles that young lady had.  The Doeblers were followed by Dick and Audrey Wasson, who, fate would have it, also ended up down here in Urbana-Champaign. “

 

Interestingly, Dr. Paley’s daughter and her husband also received Ph.D.’s from Madison recently and Dr. Paley continues to visit to enjoy the wonderful plays produced at the American Players Theatre in Spring Green.

 

Don Pienkos (Ph.D. 1971, Political Science; dpienkos@uwm.edu) writes:

“I became a Knapp House fellow in Summer 1965 and then spent a delightful three months time completing my M.A. thesis. We were then shipped off for the 1965-66 academic year to the newly established Regent apartment complex while Gov. Knowles and his wide took over the Knapp House, the "old governor's mansion" while the new mansion was being renovated.

 The nine or ten months we spent at the swanky Regent were excellent. And, when we got back to Knapp House that Summer, everything had been renovated. Then it was another year at Knapp House for me studying for PhD prelims and going out with Angela, whom I married in September 1967. We then went off to Europe together for a year of research and general fun - to return home in 1968 to finish our dissertations and pursue our careers in academe.

Since 1969 I have taught political science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. My memories of Knapp House center around the great times I enjoyed with a bunch of really great fellows - great fellows and great Knapp fellows too! There was my great friend Keith Damon - chemical engineering - and Ed Iaccarino, another Chemical Engineer and all around bon vivant. (They built a pipe-line of chemical engineers into Knapp House one weekend, I think. There were quite a number of them). There were historians Ross Dunn and Gary Hansen, fellow political scientist Marty Abravanel, mighty Tor Nilsen of Queens, New York, Law student Hank Brachtl - a genial guy always dressed as if he were about to argue a case to the Supreme Court, and courtly, friendly, Jon Strolle, our Knapp House director.

  There are so many other faces I recall and good experiences. Being part of Knapp House was just one more example of the "Wisconsin Idea" in practice – something that added to our already wonderful graduate school experience at the world's greatest university. And that was BEFORE the Alvarez era and all those trips to the Bowls!”

Daniel Power (Ph.D. 1982, Business; Daniel.Power@uni.edu) lives in Iowa and works as a business consultant.  You can find out more about Dr. Power at his website: http://www.dssresources.com/vita/djphomepage.html

 

Doug Safranek (MFA 1984) lives and paints in New York City.  This past December and January his tempura paintings were on display in the Watrous Gallery at the Overture Center here in Madison.  In New York, his work can be seen at the CACA Galleries in Manhattan.  To see some of his art, visit: http://www.artincontext.org/artist/s/doug_safranek/images.htm

 

Nitish V. Thakor (Ph.D. 1981, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; nthakor@bme.jhu.edu) served on the faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of the Northwestern University between 1981 and 1983, and since then he has been with the Johns Hopkins University, School of Medicine, where he is currently serving as a Professor of Biomedical Engineering.  He teaches and conducts research on cardiovascular and neurological instrumentation, medical microsystems, signal processing, and micro and nanotechnologies.  He has authored more than 150 peer-reviewed publications on these subjects.  He serves on the editorial boards of several journals, including the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, and Annals of Biomedical Engineering.  He has recently established a Center for Neuroengineering at the Johns Hopkins University with the aim of carrying out interdisciplinary and collaborative engineering research for basic and clinical neurosciences.  He is actively interested in developing international scientific programs, collaborative exchanges, tutorials and conferences on Neuroengineering and Medical Microsystems.  Dr. Thakor is a recipient of a Research Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health and a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation, and is a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering and IEEE.  He is also a recipient of the Centennial Medal from the University of Wisconsin School of Engineering and recognition from the students of the Alpha Eta Mu Beta Biomedical Engineering student Honor Society.