HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

NewsMakers

Jeffrey Sachs, the Galen L. Stone Professor of International Trade and director of the Harvard Institute for International Development and the Center for International Development, last month received the Commanders Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland for outstanding contributions to Poland.

Poland's Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Leszek Balcerowicz gave the award to Sachs on behalf of President Aleksander Kwasniewcki at an award ceremony at the Polish Embassy in Washington, D.C. David Lipton, a colleague of Sachs in advising the Polish government in 1989-91, was a co-recipient of the honor.

Sachs advised Poland's Solidarity movement and the first post-communist government of Poland.

Business School Associate Professor Paul A. Gompers is the recipient of a Smith-Breeden Distinguished Paper Prize, offered annually by the Journal of Finance. Gompers and his co-author, Alon Brav of Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, won the award for "Myth or Reality? The Long-Run Underperformance of Initial Public Offerings: Evidence from Venture and Non-Venture Capital Backed Firms." Associate Professor Lisa K. Meulbroek and Professor Peter Tufano, also members of the Business School finance faculty, were Smith-Breeden winners in 1992 and 1996, respectively.

Two Law School graduates, Katherine Dix '97 and Cynthia Godsoe '98, and current Law School student Mari Hinojosa '99 have been selected as 1999 Skadden Fellows by the law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.

Each fellow in the two-year program will provide civil legal assistance to those in need through various nonprofit organizations while receiving a salary paid by the Skadden Fellowship Foundation. Dix will work with the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia, Washington, D.C.; Godsoe with Child Care Law Center, San Francisco; and Hinojosa with Lawyers for Children, New York, N.Y.

Robert Schiestl, associate professor of toxicology in the Department of Cancer Cell Biology in the School of Public Health, has received the 1998 Novartis Award (formerly known as the Sandoz Award). The award honors outstanding scientific achievements in the disciplines of biology, medicine, and chemistry. The award carries an honorarium of $8,500.

Schiestl has made fundamental contributions to understanding genetic recombination in yeast and has applied these findings to the development of methods for monitoring genome rearrangements induced by environmental chemicals in a variety of in vitro systems and intact mammalian organisms.