Nobel Laureate and Pulitzer Prize Winner Receive 2003 Distinguished Alumni Award
Dr. Stanley Prusiner, C’64, M’68, Hon '98, and Melinda Wagner, Gr’85, have received the School of Arts and Sciences 2003 Distinguished Alumni Award. The award, which is presented annually, recognizes alumni who have used their strong foundation in the liberal arts to achieve professional distinction.
Stanley Prusiner, M.D.,
a neurobiologist at the University of California at San Francisco,
was awarded the 1997 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his groundbreaking
discovery and definition of a new class of disease-causing
agents called prions. There are similarities between the
loss of brain function in prion diseases and in Alzheimer's
disease, and an understanding of how prion diseases begin
and develop may one day lead to a treatment and a cure for
Alzheimer’s.
Melinda Wagner received her graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania where she studied with Richard Wernick, George Crumb, Shulamit Ran and Jay Reise. She is the recipient of numerous awards and honors for her work, including the 1999 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her Concerto for Flute, Strings, and Percussion. Wagner’s compositions are published by Theodore Presser and her Sextet (1989) has been released on the Opus One label.