Distinguished Faculty Lecturers announced

by Daniel J. Fitzgibbons, Chronicle staff

Willy E. Bemis

rofessors from the Biology, Journalism, Computer Science and Sociology departments have been selected to present this year's Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series.

     This year's series opens Tuesday, Oct. 16 with Biology professor Willy E. Bemis delivering a talk titled "The Evolution of an Ichthyologist."

     The other lecturers chosen for the series are Journalism professor Madeleine Helena Blais (Nov. 27), Computer Science professor Don Towsley (March 7), and Sociology professor N.J. Demerath (April 17).

     Faculty members selected for the program receive the Chancellor's Medal following their lectures. The medal is the highest honor bestowed upon individuals for exemplary and extraordinary service to the campus.

     The Bemis and Blais lectures will be in Memorial Hall. The Towson and Demerath lectures will be in the Massachusetts Room of the Mullins Center. All lectures begin at 4pm and are free and open to the public. A reception follows each talk.

Madeleine Blais

    Bemis is a renowned ichthyologist, an expert in fish anatomy and evolution. Much of his work has centered on recognizing broad patterns of vertebrate evolution using the analysis of the skeletons of living and extinct species. Among the vertebrates whose evolution remains most mysterious to biologists are ray-finned fishes. Bemis has spent 17 years studying them, and is embarking on new research on evolutionary patterns within the 40,000 species of higher ray-finned fishes, or teleosts.

     Bemis is director of the campus's biological collections, and has spearheaded an effort to bring these six collections together in a museum on campus. He has pursued opportunities to preserve skeletons of whales and other marine mammals in addition to fishes. "It is important to accept responsibility for collecting and curating zoological specimens whenever possible, for there is no guarantee that such opportunities will occur again," Bemis says. He has conducted research with the University of Chicago, the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, and the Field Museum of Natural History. His work has been detailed in The New Yorker magazine, in an article written by literary journalist John McPhee. Bemis received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He has been on the faculty since 1984.

     A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Madeleine Blais will speak on "Personal Narrative in an Impersonal World: Finding the Story in Your Experience."

Don Towsley

     Her most recent book, "Uphill Walkers: A Memoir of a Family," is a memoir of her childhood in Granby, where her mother raised six children after the un-expected death of Blais's father. Blais is also the author of "In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle" (1995), which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in nonfiction; "The Heart Is an Instrument"; and "Portraits in Journalism" (1992).

     She has held staff positions at various publications including the Boston Globe, the Trenton Times, and the Miami Herald's Tropic Magazine. She has also written for the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, Northeast Magazine in the Hartford Courant, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Newsday, Nieman Reports, the Detroit Free Press, and the San Jose Mercury News.

     Blais joined the Journalism faculty in 1987 and teaches courses in the literature of journalism, memoir and advanced nonfiction writing. Her attraction to journalism, she explains, is rooted in its "power to capture ... what was real, the music of what happens, and to impound all those details that defy embellishment."

     She received a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University in 1986. Blais received a master's degree from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

     "The Internet: Order or Chaos?" is the topic of Don Towsley's lecture.

N.J. Demerath

     Considered a pioneer and a leading scholar in the areas of computer systems and networking, Towsley has focused throughout his career on two specific areas: the development of mathematical techniques for analyzing the performance of complex systems, including networking; and the development of control mechanisms for these complex systems. Much of his work has focused on "multicasting," a highly efficient way of sending information via computer to more than one recipient. His most recent research has been ex-ploring the use of multicasting to automatically monitor how well a network is operating.

    There is great room for improvement in network performance, according to Towsley. "Often data gets delayed or thrown away," he said. One of his aims is to create tools that will enable people to identify where in the network a problem has occurred.

     Towsley is an elected fellow of both the Association of Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), two major technical societies in the field of computer science and engineering.

     He joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1976 after completing his Ph.D. at the University of Texas. In 1985, he transferred to the Department of Computer Science, where he is co-director of the Computer Networks Laboratory.

     During 1982-83, he was a visiting scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. and during the year 1989-90, he was a visiting professor at the Labora-toire MASI in Paris.

     He has been an editor of the IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, and Journal of Dynamic Discrete Event Systems. He is currently on the editorial boards of Networks and Performance Evaluation.

     The lecture series concludes with N. J. Demerath's talk entitled "Cross and Double-Cross: Religion and Politics at Home and Abroad."

      Currently the immediate past president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, the world's most eminent association of social scientists researching religion, Demerath is also the author of two books on that topic. The newly released "Crossing the Gods: World Religions and Worldly Politics" concerns religious conflict and violence in 14 countries around the world visited by Demerath, including Guatemala, India, Israel, Indonesia and Northern Ireland. "A Bridging of Faiths: Religion and Politics in a New England City" was published in 1992.

     Demerath joined the faculty as chair of the Department of Sociology in 1972. He held that position until 1977, and again, from 1981-86. Prior to his appointment here, Demerath taught at the University of Wisconsin for 10 years and served two years as executive officer of the American Sociological Association.

     He received his B.A. at Harvard University and his master's and Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley.