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Awards and Honors

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has bestowed one of two 1998 Pioneer Awards on Richard Stallman, a research affiliate in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Mr. Stallman founded the GNU Project in 1984 and is the principal author of GNU Emacs, the GNU C Compiler, the GNU Debugger GDB, and parts of other software packages. He is president and founder of the Free Software Foundation, a not-for-profit organization that works for freedom to copy, modify and redistribute computer programs. In 1990, Mr. Stallman was awarded a "genius grant" by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

The Pioneer Awards recognize "individuals who have made significant and influential contributions to the development of computer-based communications or to the empowerment of individuals in using computers." One of the 1996 recipients was Ethernet creator and 3Com founder Robert Metcalfe (SB '68), the 1997-98 president of the MIT Association of Alumni and Alumnae.
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Three members of the biology department have been honored by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Associate Professor Tyler Jacks, an HHMI Assistant Investigator, has received the ASMB-Amgen Award ($5,000 plus a $20,000 unrestricted research grant). Associate Professor Tania Baker, also an HHMI Assistant Investigator, is this year's recipient of the $5,000 Schering-Plough Scientific Achievement Award. Alexander Rich, the William Thompson Sedgwick Professor of Biophysics, is the 1998 recipient of the $5,000 ASBMB-Merck Award. The three professors will lecture and receive their awards at the organization's annual meeting in Washington, DC, in May.

A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on February 25, 1998.

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