New Loans for Faculty Housing
Provost John Etchemendy announced in November a new loan program to help faculty purchase housing. Projected to cost the University $85 million over the next five years, loan packages would enable an assistant professor making $62,000 a year to buy a house that costs as much as $724,000. Stanford also will launch a rent-reduction program for faculty who want to rent housing in the new Stanford West complex. The measures, Etchemendy told the Faculty Senate, are "intended to get faculty into this horrible housing market," which is rivaled only by Manhattan.
$31.8 Million for New Pulmonary Center
Stanford physicians and researchers specializing in treating patients with severe diseases of blood vessels in the lungs have received an anonymous donation of $31.8 million to establish the Vera Moulton Wall Center for Pulmonary Vascular Disease. By providing diagnostic and therapeutic services for adults and children, the center "creates a new model . . . it crosses the age barrier," says co-director Ramona Doyle, MD, assistant professor of pulmonary and critical care medicine. Assistant professor of pediatrics Jeffrey Feinstein, MD, MPH, will co-direct the center with Doyle.
Hoover Fellowship to Study Radio Free Europe
The Hoover Institution has established the Bernard Osher Fellowship Program to support research by senior journalists. They and other experts will delve into the archives of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, which recorded the history of major events in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe during the Cold War and the first years of transition from communism to democracy. The two radio services, which were headquartered in Munich from 1950 to 1995, once had more than 1,000 employees, mostly émigrés from Eastern Europe and the republics of the Soviet Union.
SLAC Wins Praise for On-Time, On-Budget B Factory
The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) on October 17 won a year 2000 award from the Department of Energy for program and project management. The award acknowledged the on-time, on-budget completion of the $293 million B Factory Project, which scientists will use to collide a beam of electrons with a counter-rotating beam of anti-electrons to produce subatomic particles called B mesons. "With the B Factory, SLAC has another major scientific project that will take us well into the next decade," SLAC director Jonathan Dorfan said in accepting the award. "SLAC is poised to make major new contributions to basic science."
