The Wilbur Cross Medal

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2005 Recipients

Lincoln Pierson Brower ’57 PhD
Peter B. Dervan ’72 PhD
Jennifer L. Hochschild ’79 PhD
Richard Rorty ’56 PhD
Eric F. Wieschaus ’74 PhD

Lincoln Pierson Brower '57 PhD (Zoology)

Lincoln Brower, a research professor at Sweet Briar College, has spent nearly 50 years studying butterfly ecology and evolution. He taught for 23 years before becoming Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Florida. His research on the migration of the monarch butterfly has expanded scientific knowledge and influenced public thinking about the conservation of endangered ecosystems. Author of more than 200 scientific papers and editor of two books, he has produced two Emmy Award-winning documentary films.

Peter B. Dervan '72 PhD (Chemistry)

Peter Dervan is a world leader in the field of bioorganic chemistry and winner of the 2005 Ronald Breslow Award, given by the American Chemical Society for outstanding work in the field of bio-mimetic chemistry. After graduating from Yale, Dervan was a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford and then became a faculty member at Cal Tech, where he is now the Bren Professor of Chemistry. He created the field known as bioorganic chemistry, studying principles for the sequence-specific recognition of DNA. He has created synthetic molecules with affinities and sequence specificities comparable to proteins that occur in nature.

Jennifer L. Hochschild '79 PhD (Political Science)

Jennifer Hochschild is the Henry LeBarre Jayne Professor of Government and professor of African and African-American Studies at Harvard. After graduating from Yale, she taught at Duke, Columbia and Princeton. She is the founding editor of the American Political Science Association's new journal, Perspectives on Politics. Her groundbreaking books include What's Fair? American Beliefs about Distributive Justice (1981); Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation (1995); Social Policies for Children (1996); The American Dream and the Public Schools, with Nathan Scovronick (2003) and others.

Richard Rorty '56 PhD (Philosophy)

Richard Rorty is one of the most widely read American philosophers whose work has earned him a MacArthur grant and multiple honorary doctorates. After Yale, he served in the U.S. Army for two years before teaching at Wellesley, and then at Princeton for 22 years. He was named University Professor of the Humanities at the University of Virginia, where he remained for 16 years. Since 1998 he has been professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford. Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) established his reputation. His Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) has been translated into at least 22 languages, including Chinese, Korean, Russian, French and Turkish, spreading his insights around the world.

Eric F. Wieschaus '74 PhD (Biology)

Eric Wieschaus was Nobel laureate in Physiology/Medicine in 1995. As a graduate student at Yale, he began the study of Drosophila that he continued in labs in Switzerland and Germany, teaming up with Christiane Nusslein, who shared the Nobel Prize with him. Together they discovered the genes responsible for establishing the basic segmental body pattern of the fruit fly. These same genes play key roles in vertebrate (including human) development, and this led to a revolution in the understanding of embryology and the realization that all animals share the same basic set of genes. Wieschaus joined the faculty at Princeton in 1981, where he is now a professor of molecular biology. Since 1997, he has been an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute research labs.