Alumnae to be honored by Radcliffe Association in June

Award-winning author Gish Jen, feminist legal scholar Clare Dalton, and National Public Radio (NPR) senior foreign correspondent Anne Garrels are among the distinguished women who will be honored by the Radcliffe Association during Commencement/Reunion Week.

The award ceremonies, which will include the presentation of Alumnae Recognition and Distinguished Service Awards, Graduate Society Medals, and the Jane Rainie Opel ’50 Young Alumna Award, will take place on Radcliffe Day, Friday (June 7).

Jen, Dalton, and Garrels, along with bioterrorism expert Margaret Hamburg, Harvard professor Leila Ahmed, and world-class athlete and cancer survivor Cara Dunne-Yates will participate in a symposium, “Making a Difference in a Challenging World,” from 10:15 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. at the Loeb Drama Center.

Alumnae Recognition Awards

Anne Garrels ’72, Margaret Hamburg ’77, M.D. ’83, and Gish Jen ’77, B ’87, R.I. ’02 are the recipients of Alumnae Recognition Awards from the Radcliffe Association. Presented annually, these awards honor women “whose lives and spirits exemplify the value of a liberal arts education.” The awards will be presented during the symposium on Friday (June 7).

Anne Garrels, a senior foreign correspondent for National Public Radio, has spent her professional life reporting on major international news events, ranging from Tiananmen Square and the Gulf War to Bosnia and the Middle East. Since last September, Garrels has spent several months with the Northern Alliance in northern Afghanistan and in the environs of Kabul. She was in Pakistan earlier this year and has just returned from a month in Israel.

Garrels began her news career in 1975 as a production assistant for “ABC News.” She remained with the station for 10 years, serving as bureau chief and correspondent in Moscow and Central America. Garrels became the State Department correspondent for “NBC News” in 1986.

Since 1988, Garrels has worked for NPR, where she is a senior foreign correspondent covering international issues and special projects throughout Asia and the Middle East. Much of her time is spent in the independent states that once comprised the Soviet Union.

Garrels earned her bachelor’s degree from Radcliffe in 1972. She serves on the board of the Committee to Protect Journalists, is a mentor to young journalists and foreign students, and lectures frequently on foreign affairs. Garrels is also a volunteer emergency medical technician.

Among her honors are Columbia University-Dupont awards in 1991 and 1997 for her coverage of the Gulf War and the former Soviet Union; and Overseas Press Club awards in 1996 and 1998 for her coverage of Russia and her series on global water issues. Garrels was chosen as an Edward R. Murrow Fellow in 1997 and spent a year at the Council on Foreign Relations. This year, she was the Joe Alex Morris Jr. Memorial Lecturer at the Nieman Foundation.

Margaret Hamburg is the vice president for biological programs at the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), a new organization in Washington, D.C., whose mission is to strengthen global security by preventing the spread of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction and reducing the risk of their use.

Before joining NTI last year, Hamburg served for four years as an assistant secretary for planning and evaluation at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. From 1991 to 1997, Hamburg was the commissioner of health for the city of New York.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard and Radcliffe in 1977, Hamburg earned her M.D. at Harvard Medical School in 1983. She conducted her internship and residency in internal medicine at the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, which is affiliated with Cornell University Medical College. In 1992, Hamburg was named a scholar at the Public Health Leadership Institute at the University of California.

Hamburg is a fellow of the American College of Physicians and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. She serves on the Harvard University Board of Overseers, on the board of directors of Doctors of the World, and on the National Academy of Sciences’s Committee on Science and Technology for Countering Terrorism.

Gish Jen is the award-winning author of two novels and a collection of short stories that focus on immigration, assimilation, and the “American project.” She has taught fiction writing at the University of Iowa, Tufts University, and the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and will teach at Harvard in 2002 and 2003. Next spring, she will be teaching in China on a Fulbright fellowship.

Jen’s literary career has many highlights. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The New York Times. “Typical American” (1991), her first novel, was a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and was named a New York Times Notable Book. Its sequel, “Mona in the Promised Land” (1996), was named one of the 10 best books of 1996 by The Los Angeles Times.

Her short stories have appeared in “Best American Short Stories” in 1988 and 1995. John Updike honored her by including “Birthmates” in his anthology titled “Best American Short Stories of the Century” (1999). Jen will be featured in the “American Masters” series on the American novel, scheduled to be broadcast on PBS in 2004.

After earning her undergraduate degree cum laude at Harvard and Radcliffe in 1977, Jen received a master of fine arts degree in fiction writing from the Radcliffe Alumnae Award Winners/2002 University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1983. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation. A Bunting fellow at Radcliffe in 1986, Jen is currently a writer-in-residence at Radcliffe.

Since 1990, Jen has made numerous appearances at universities throughout the United States as well as in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

Jane Rainie Opel ’50 young alumna award

Cara Dunne-Yates ’92 will receive the Jane Rainie Opel ’50 Young Alumna Award from the Radcliffe Association during the symposium on June 7 at the Loeb Drama Center.

The award, which honors former Radcliffe College Alumnae Association [now the Radcliffe Association] executive director Jane Rainie Opel ’50 for her 18 years of service, is presented annually to an alumna in the 10th reunion class for an outstanding contribution to the advancement of women, to her profession, or to the institute.

Cara Dunne-Yates is a bioethics scholar, a published author, a motivational speaker, a competitive athlete, and a fellow in the Brandeis University Women’s Studies Scholars Program, where she is writing her memoir. She has also been the co-director of the New England Retinoblastoma Family Foundation.

Blind since age 5 and a three-time cancer survivor, Dunne-Yates has not allowed illness and disability to deter her from living a successful life. At age 11, she qualified for the U.S. Disabled Alpine Ski Team and became one of the youngest athletes to represent the United States in a major international competition. She won silver medals in giant slalom and downhill events at the World Disabled Ski Championships in 1982.

In 1994, Dunne-Yates took up tandem-bike racing and became one of the few athletes to represent the United States in both Winter and Summer Paralympic Games. With her sighted bicycling partner Scott Evans, she won bronze and silver medals at the Summer Paralympic Games in Atlanta in 1996 and bronze medals at the World Championships in 1998.

At Harvard, Dunne-Yates concentrated in East Asian studies, earning an undergraduate degree magna cum laude, and was elected the first marshal of her class. She received her doctor of jurisprudence degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law in 1997. Her legal studies focused on bioethics and health policy.

An inductee into the International Scholar-Athlete Hall of Fame in 2001, Dunne-Yates received the 2001 Spirit of Survivorship Award from the Lance Armstrong Foundation.

Graduate Society Medals

Leila Ahmed B ’86 and Clare Dalton L.L.M. ’73, B ’88 will receive Graduate Society Medals from the Radcliffe Association. The medals are given annually to alumnae of Radcliffe and Harvard graduate schools and Radcliffe’s Bunting Program, who have made outstanding contributions to their professions. They will receive their awards during the symposium on Radcliffe Day, June 7.

In 1999, Leila Ahmed became the first person to hold the professorship in Women’s Studies in Religion at the Harvard Divinity School (HDS).

Before joining the Divinity School faculty, Ahmed spent 18 years at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she was a professor of women’s studies and Near Eastern studies. During 1992, she was a distinguished visiting professor at The American University in Cairo. Earlier in her career, Ahmed taught at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the Cambridge College of Arts and Technology in England, and the University of the United Arab Emirates in Al-Ain.

Born in Egypt, Ahmed earned her undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral degrees from the University of Cambridge, England.

Ahmed’s professional accomplishments include books, articles, and presentations related to women, Islam, and Arabic societies. Two of her most significant works are “Women and Gender in Islam: The Historical Roots of a Modern Debate” and a memoir, “A Border Passage: From Cairo to America: A Woman’s Journey.”

Ahmed received a Bunting Fellowship from Radcliffe in 1985 and was honored with a Distinguished Faculty Fellowship Award from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1996. She also was given a Ford Foundation grant in 2001 to study women and Islam in America.

Clare Dalton is an educator, a leading feminist legal scholar, and a pioneer in the development of legal education concerning domestic violence.

Dalton held academic appointments at the Washington College of Law and Harvard Law School (HLS) before joining the faculty at the Northeastern University School of Law in 1988. Building on her interest and expertise in the field of domestic violence, Dalton established two programs at Northeastern Law School: the domestic violence clinical program in 1990 and the Domestic Violence Institute in 1993.

Dalton holds an undergraduate degree in jurisprudence from Oxford University and a master of laws degree from HLS. She is the author of articles, reviews, and, with Elizabeth M. Schneider, a pioneering legal casebook in the domestic violence field titled “Battered Women and the Law.”

In 2000, Dalton was named the George J. and Kathleen Waters Matthews Distinguished University Professor of Law at Northeastern. She also received the Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus’s Abigail Adams Award in 2001, the Massachusetts Women’s Bar Association’s Leila J. Robinson Award in 1997, and the Northeastern University School of Law’s Urban Law Distinguished Professor Award in 1998. Dalton was awarded a Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe in 1987 and was named Feminist of the Year in 1993 by the Feminist Majority Foundation.

A member of the advisory board panel of the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, Dalton is also a former chair of the Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure, an initiative of the Association of American Law Schools.

Distinguished Service Awards

Marguerite Coughlin ’42 (posthumously), Suzanne Young Murray ’62, and Jacquelyn Seevak Sanders ’52 will receive Distinguished Service Awards from the Radcliffe Association. Given annually, the awards honor alumnae “for outstanding service to the Radcliffe Association, and, through it, to the Institute.” Radcliffe Association President Raine Figueroa ’84, M.B.A. ’91 will announce the names during the annual luncheon on June 7; the awards will be presented at the association’s annual meeting in Agassiz Theatre at 2:30 pm.