Mink, minted

As part of its American Women Quarters Program, the US Mint released a new quarter honoring Patsy Takemoto Mink, JD’51, the first woman of color elected to the US House of Representatives and the first Asian American woman to serve in Congress. Mink, who represented Hawaii for more than 24 years, fought for policies supporting women and education. She authored bills including Title IX, the Early Childhood Education Act, and the Women’s Education Equity Act. Title IX was renamed the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act following her death in 2002. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 2014.

Top right corner

Saul Bellow, EX’39, who taught in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought from 1962 to 1993, now appears on a postage stamp. Released by the US Postal Service in February, the stamp features an ink and watercolor portrait of Bellow in front of an L train in downtown Chicago. The city, where Bellow’s family settled when he was 9 and where he spent most of his adult life, serves as the backdrop for many of his novels and stories. A 1976 Nobel laureate, Bellow also won a Pulitzer Prize and three National Book Awards, among other honors.

Reporter report

Two alumni won Pulitzer Prizes in May. Trina Reynolds-Tyler, MPP’20, of the Invisible Institute, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Local Reporting for “Missing in Chicago,” a seven-part investigative series about police negligence in missing persons cases, which revealed that Black women and girls were disproportionately impacted. Joshua Kaplan, SB’17, of ProPublica, with four colleagues, received the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for investigative reporting on billionaires’ efforts to exert political influence over Supreme Court justices. Since this work was published, the Supreme Court has adopted its first code of conduct.

Welcome to the National …

Six alumni were elected to the National Academy of Sciences in April: Zhenan Bao, SM’93, PhD’95, professor of chemical engineering at Stanford; Susan L. Cutter, AM’74, PhD’76, professor of geography and director of the Hazards Vulnerability and Resilience Institute at the University of South Carolina; Edward L. Glaeser, PhD’92, professor of economics at Harvard; Todd R. Golub, MD’89, director of the Broad Institute, investigator at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School; Jonas C. Peters, SB’93, professor of chemistry and director of the Resnick Sustainability Institute at Caltech; and Celia A. Schiffer, AB’86, professor of biochemistry and molecular biotechnology and director of the Institute for Drug Resistance at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School.

… And American Academies

In April seven alumni were elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences: Alison M. Bell, AB’96, professor in the School of Integrative Biology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Bruce Carruthers, PhD’91, professor of sociology at Northwestern; Susan L. Cutter; Nathaniel Hendren, SB’05, professor of economics at MIT; Charles L. Kane, AB’85, professor of physics at the University of Pennsylvania; Webb Keane, AM’84, PhD’90, professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan; and Vivien Ann Schmidt, AM’73, PhD’81, professor of European integration and professor emerita of international relations and political science at Boston University.

Soros Fellow

Russell Legate-Yang, AB’22, was selected as a 2024 Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow, an honor given to 30 US immigrants or children of immigrants annually in recognition of their potential to make significant contributions to the United States or to their academic fields. The fellowship comes with up to $90,000 in funding. Legate-Yang’s award will support his doctoral studies in economics at MIT, where he will research the effectiveness of K–12 public school education in order to better inform policy decisions. Since graduating from the College, Legate-Yang has worked as a research fellow at MIT’s Blueprint Labs.