In foreign affairs news, nine students were awarded Benjamin A. Gilman scholarships to take part in study-abroad programs; 16 students and recent graduates received Fulbright fellowships, which fund a year of international post-baccalaureate study; and three students received scholarships from the State Department to engage in intensive language study abroad, the languages being Persian, Bangla-Bengali, and Turkish. The senior class gift set a record of 1,033 participants, breaking 1,000 for the first time in the University’s history. VP for Mission and Ministry Jack Butler, SJ, had agreed to eat an Eagle’s Deli Challenge Burger (five pounds of meat, bacon, cheese, and bun) if the Class of 2012 (they number 2,327) exceeded 1,000 gifts, but escaped his deserved fate by arguing a narrow technicality: that the seniors didn’t complete their task until the designated deadline of May 15 had passed. “Ocean by the marsh/The marsh fills with water, dark/A storm is coming,” won a haiku award for third-grader Kara Culgin in the annual science poetry contest for Massachusetts schoolchildren that’s been directed by emeritus professor of education George Ladd for 24 years. Assistant professor J. Elisenda Grigsby of the mathematics department has received a National Science Foundation career award to further her work in topology. The University gave honorary degrees to Joseph A. Appleyard, SJ, ’53, formerly a member of the English faculty, director of the A&S honors program, and founding vice president of Mission and Ministry; William V. Campbell, chairman of the board of Intuit, Inc.; Navyn A. Salem ’94, founder of Edesia, which manufactures innovative foods to treat childhood malnutrition; Liz Walker, former television anchor and founder of the Walker Group, an international social service agency; and Bob Woodruff, another former anchor, whose experience of brain injury, suffered while covering the Iraq war, led to the launch of a foundation to serve similarly afflicted members of the armed forces. Woodruff gave the Commencement address. Terrence Devino, SJ, was appointed secretary of the University, supervising an office that oversees special events such as Commencement and the Sesquicentennial celebration. He will succeed Mary Lou DeLong NC’71, a former senior vice president of University relations, who will retire in December. Kelli Armstrong, who has directed institutional research at Boston College, was appointed a vice president. The World History Association Book Prize for 2012 has gone to Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850, by history professor Prasannan Parthasarathi. Parthasarathi’s thesis rests on social development, and not merely technology—the usual suspect. The New England Aquarium and the Institute for Contemporary Art have been entered into the list of Boston cultural organizations that offer free admission to students. The University Library joined the Center for Research Libraries, which offers online access to “little-known” documents, including Albert Einstein’s doctoral dissertation, railroad timetables from the late 19th century, and more than 100,000 pages from the archives of the Khmer Rouge regime. Connell School dean Susan Gennaro was appointed to the National Advisory Council for Nursing Research, which advises the NIH on research relating to nursing practice. The (relatively) new Office of Health Promotion certified its first class of “health coaches”—34 students who’ve been trained to assist other students with the development of health improvement plans. Maxim Shrayer, professor of Russian, English, and Jewish studies, received a Guggenheim Fellowship to support work on the contemporaneous literary response to the Holocaust by Jewish-Russian poets serving in the Soviet armed forces or as war correspondents. This year’s Venture Competition prize ($10,000) went to biology majors Deckard Sorensen ’12 and Miguel Galvez ’12, who with a nanotechnologist colleague at MIT designed a water collecting device that would optimize condensation collection from small amounts of moisture in desert air. The device is named for the Namib beetle, a desert creature that Sorensen studied and that creates a personal water supply by collecting condensate on its body. Bloomberg Businessweek ranked the Carroll School of Management’s undergraduate program ninth-best in the nation. “The University’s decision to turn O’Neill Plaza into a lawn will beautify campus and give a Dustbowl-like feel,” the Heights editorialized, offering further evidence that Dustbowl doesn’t mean dustbowl on Chestnut Hill. Researchers working on the history of Boston College in conjunction with several sesquicentennial projects have identified the designer of the original Boston College seal, long thought to be the work of late 19th-century Jesuits with time and claret on their hands. The creator was Pierre de Chaignon la Rose (1871–1940), a Harvard graduate who liked to describe himself as “a man of letters” but who published little and made a life as a purveyor of dressy heraldry to colleges and bishops. A rumor that his birth name was Peter Ross was never proven. His précis of the Boston College seal begins: “On a field gules, above a trimount in base or, an open book argent edged of the second, thereon an inscription. . . .”

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