Horace Mann Medal

Horace Mann, class of 1819 Father of American public school education Born in 1796, Horace Mann spent his youth in poverty on his family's farm. Although his schooling was limited to about three months a year, he supplemented his learning through religious studies and tutoring. He entered Brown University as a sophomore, graduated in 1819, and went on to earn a law degree. Mann served as a state representative and, later, as a senator in the Massachusetts legislature. He helped pass legislation to create the nation's first state board of education, and from 1837 to 1848, served as the board's first secretary, creating a system of public schools in Massachusetts that would become a model for public education across the country. Mann's statue and that of Daniel Webster still flank the entrance to the Massachusetts State House. In 1848 Mann was elected to Congress, where he fought vigorously against slavery. In 1854 he was named president of Antioch College in Ohio, where he remained until 1859. A few weeks before his death, he urged Antioch's graduating class, "Be ashamed to die before you have won some battle for humanity."

The Horace Mann Medal was established in 2003 on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Brown University Graduate School. The award is given annually to a Brown Graduate School alumnus or alumna who has made significant contributions in his or her field, inside or outside of academia. The medal replaces the Distinguished Graduate School Alumni Award, and, beginning in 2008, will be awarded at the University's Commencement exercises in May. Any graduate of a Brown advanced-degree program is eligible.

Nominations for the Horace Mann Medal can be submitted at any time throughout the year. The final selection process takes place in the late summer and fall, in conjunction with the University's selection of honorary-degree recipients. There is no nomination form for this process. Nominators should provide as much information as possible about the nominee; send all nominations to Graduate_School@brown.edu.

Horace Mann Medal winners:

2007-08

Mary Lou Jepsen ’87, ’97 Ph.D.

Mary Lou Jepsen, the founding chief technology officer of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), has been a pioneer in developing display technologies —from flat-panel televisions and laser displays, to holography and day-lighting. She grew up on a family farm in Connecticut before diving into technology during her junior year at Brown University, driving nuclear submarines for the U.S. Naval Underwater Systems Center in New London, Conn. She graduated from Brown with degrees in art and electrical engineering, then earned an M.S. from MIT, where she studied in the Media Lab's Spatial Imaging group. After briefly teaching computer science and creating large-scale holographic art installations, Jepsen returned to Brown to earn a Ph.D. in optics.

In 1995 Jepsen cofounded MicroDisplay, a California–based company that manufactures liquid crystal-on-silicon chips for high-definition TV displays. She was chief technology officer of Intel’s display division through 2004, leaving to join Nicholas Negroponte in January 2005 to establish One Laptop Per Child. The company's mission has been to deliver low-cost, mesh-networked laptops en masse to children in developing countries.

During her two years as chief technology officer of the OLPC non-profit foundation, Jepsen invented the power-efficient screen that became a key feature of the $100 laptop known as the XO.  By the end of 2005, she had completed the initial architecture, led the development of the first prototype – unveiled by Secretary General Kofi Annan at a United Nations summit – and signed up some of the world's largest manufacturers to produce the XO-1 model.  The "greenest" of all laptop computers, the XO can be run on solar power, making it useful in remote areas with unreliable or limited energy sources.

Jepsen left OLPC at the end of 2007 to commercialize the technology through Pixel-Qi, the company she founded and now heads. Through Pixel Qi she is bringing a new generation of super high-resolution, low-cost and low-power screens into mainstream laptops, e-book readers, cellphones and digital cameras.

2006-07
Tracy Denean Sharpley-Whiting '94 Ph.D.

Professor of French and Italian at Vanderbilt University, Tracy Denean Sharpley-Whiting received her Ph.D. in French Studies from Brown in 1994. A national commentator on issues ranging from race and cultural stereotyping, to hip-hop culture, to the pre-9/11 relationship between France and the United States, Sharpley-Whiting was named as a "rising superstar" among black intellectuals in the Chicago Sun-Times in 2002 by former Brown professor Michael Eric Dyson. "In an era when interdisciplinarity is lauded, Sharpley-Whiting's immense intellect and huge curiosity make her an ideal example," Dyson wrote. She is "one of the country's most brilliant and prolific racial theorists."

Sharpley-Whiting teaches comparative diasporic literary and cultural movements, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French narrative, Francophone Studies, critical race studies, feminist theory, Jazz Age Paris, film, and black popular culture at Vanderbilt, where she is also director of African American and Diaspora Studies and the W. T. Bandy Center for Baudelaire and Modern French Studies.

The author of many articles and book chapters, Sharpley-Whiting's published work includes Negritude Women (2002); Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears and Primitive Narratives in French (1999); and Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms (1998). Her co-edited volumes include The Black Feminist Reader (2000); Spoils of War: Women of Color, Cultures & Revolutions (1997), which received Honorable Mention for Outstanding Book by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America ; and Fanon: A Critical Reader (1996).

Sharpley-Whiting serves on the editorial boards of Modern Fiction Studies and The International Journal of Francophone Studies, and was chair of the Advisory Committee on Foreign Languages and Literatures for the Modern Language Association. She has also won fellowships from the Rockefeller and Camargo foundations, and the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation. She has recently completed a book entitled: Pimps Up, Ho's Down: Young Black Women, Hip-Hop and the New Gender Politics (New York University Press, 2007) and is beginning work on another book on black women in Paris during the Jazz Age.

For geophysicist Maria Zuber, exploration is a way of life. The first woman to head the department of Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Zuber has spent her lifetime extending the outer edges of our knowledge of the solar system. Beginning at age ten, when she ground the optics for her first telescope, Zuber has been helping us discern the minutest details on objects that are very, very far away.

A University of Pennsylvania graduate, Zuber earned her Ph.D. in geophysics at Brown in 1986 and in 1995 joined the faculty at MIT, where she is currently the E.A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics. She studies the structure and evolution of planets, specializing in the application of laser-ranging and radio-tracking systems on spacecraft. She has led or co-led spacecraft instrument investigations that have flown to the moon, Mars, and an asteroid, and she is involved in missions under development that will orbit Mars, the moon, Mercury, and the asteroids Ceres and Vesta. The topographic map of Mars produced by her laser altimeter on the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft is the most accurate topography model for any planet, including Earth.

Named one of "the 50 Most Important Women in Science" by Discover magazine in 2002, Zuber is the recipient of numerous honors and awards. She is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the National Academy of Sciences, and she is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Geophysical Union. Appointed to the Presidential Commission on Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy by President George W. Bush in 2004, Zuber has been honored by NASA with the Distinguished Public Service Medal as well as a variety of project-based awards.

Zuber lives in Lexington , Massachusetts , with her husband, Jack Mizerak, a financial executive, and their sons, Jack and Jordan.

When Wen-Hsiung Li began his Ph.D. program in applied mathematics at Brown in the late 1960s, biology and mathematics were unrelated fields. Thanks in large part to the research he has conducted since leaving Brown, however, these and other disciplines have joined forces to form a number of entirely new endeavors. Brown's new graduate programs in biostatistics and bioengineering, for example, owe much to Li's pioneering efforts in his own field, molecular evolution.

Li completed his Ph.D. in 1972 and went on to write one of the first textbooks on molecular evolution. As a postdoctoral researcher, he began work on what would become the first of his signature discoveries: the "molecular clock." Li was the first scientist to successfully prove that different species evolved at different rates over time. (Rats, for example, evolve about five times faster than a humans.) His other contributions include improving the tests that determine organisms' genetic relationships, tracking mutation rates in males and females, identifying the role of "junk DNA" in the evolutionary process, and exploring the origin of fullcolor vision in primates.

The George Beadle Distinguished Service Professor in Ecology and Evolution, Li has been at the University of Chicago since 1999. He received a bachelor's degree in engineering from Chung-Yuang College of Science and Engineering, Taiwan, in 1965, and a master's degree from National Central University, Taiwan, in 1968. After Brown, he pursued postdoctoral research in genetics at the University of Wisconsin and in 1973 became assistant professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center-Houston.

Li has served as an editor or associate editor of several international journals in genetics and evolution. He was elected president of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution in 2000, to Taiwan's Academia Sinica (National Academy) in 1998, to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999, and to the National Academy of Sciences in 1993. He was awarded the Balzan Prize 2003 for Genetics and Evolution, a highly prestigious honor in sciences and humanities.

Joel D. Scheraga is national program director for the Global Change Research Program in the United States Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Research and Development. Responsible for supervising an extensive research effort, as well as several laboratories and centers, Scheraga directs policy-related assessments of global changes in air and water quality, ecosystems, and human health. He chaired the assessment effort that resulted in the EPA's report to Congress on the potential consequences of climate variability and change.

Scheraga's contributions to environmental research and policy extend beyond national borders. He is vice chair of the Global Change Program of the World Conservation Union's Commission on Protected Areas and serves as the U.S. delegate to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Scheraga has published numerous articles on global climate change, environmental economics, public policy, the integration of science and policy in multidisciplinary programs, and applied microeconomics. He was co-editor and lead author of Climate Change and Human Health: Risks and Responses, released by the World Health Organization in 2003, and he co-authored a report on the effects of climate change on water quality in the Great Lakes region. In recognition for his contribution to this project, he was awarded an EPA bronze medal for commendable service – one of five such awards that he has received in his tenure at the agency.

Prior to joining the EPA, Scheraga taught economics at Rutgers University and was a visiting professor of economics at Princeton. He received his bachelor's degree in geological sciences and his master's degree and doctorate in economics from Brown University.