Alumni Gazette
In the News
Bucknell Names Mitchell ’81 (PhD) President
Historian and longtime college administrator Brian Mitchell
’81 (PhD) is moving 250 miles east to become the president of another
highly regarded Pennsylvania university. Mitchell, a specialist in 19th-century
social and ethnic history, takes over as president of Bucknell University in
July.
Since 1998, he has served as president of Washington & Jefferson College
near Pittsburgh. Before that, he was president of the Association of Independent
Colleges and Universities of Pennsylvania, an organization representing many
of the state’s private colleges and universities.
In announcing his decision in March, Mitchell said Bucknell’s reputation
as a premiere undergraduate institution made it an attractive place to work.
“Bucknell University is among a handful of the leading universities in
America,” he said. “It is a tremendous honor to be selected as the
university’s new president.”
Bucknell, located about 50 miles north of Harrisburg in central Pennsylvania,
has about 3,500 students in undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs.
Racing to Beat Illegal Steroids
When investigators want to know the chemical breakdown of increasingly sophisticated
versions of anabolic steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs, they often
turn to Don Catlin ’65M (MD).
According to Time magazine, Catlin, professor of pharmacology at UCLA
and director of the Olympic Analytical Laboratory, helped federal investigators
analyze the drug that led to indictments last March for a San Francisco–area
company whose clients are alleged to include Major League Baseball players.
Catlin, who has directed the only lab in the United States that’s accredited
by the International Olympic Committee since it was created to test for drug
use in the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, says the competition to create nearly
undetectable performance-enhancing substances is like an arms race. “People
are developing designer drugs of all sorts,” he told Time. “That’s
the bitter part. The sweetness is that [this time] it was discovered.”
French, Italian, Russian . . . and Elvish?
Renee Fleming ’83E (MM) has added some
new languages to her repertoire, if you count two Tolkien dialects in which
the soprano sang for the soundtrack of The Lord of the Rings: The Return
of the King, composed by Howard Shore. Music for the blockbuster movie
won an Oscar last February.
They Are the Champions—Again
The women’s basketball team of Monroe Community College in Rochester
won a second national basketball championship last winter under coach Tim
Parrinello ’91. Since the former Rochester linebacker took over
the head coaching spot in 1996, the Lady Tribunes have won 92 percent of their
games, and 21 players have gone on to Division I basketball.
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