COLLEGE TO AWARD HONORARY DEGREES AT 128th COMMENCEMENT CEREMONY
April 26, 2001, Bloomfield, NJ -- Bloomfield College is pleased to announce that at its 128th Commencement ceremony on Thursday, May 24 at 9:30 a.m., the independent, four-year liberal arts institution will award honorary doctorate degrees to internationally recognized religious leader and political activist Rev. Moses William Howard, Merck drug pioneer Arthur A. Patchett, author and philanthropist Elizabeth Penick-Schmitz, and Lucent physicist Magaly Spector.
|
|
Rev. Moses William Howard, an internationally recognized religious leader and political activist, has served as pastor of Bethany Baptist Church in Newark since October 2000. Before that, he served as President of New York Theological Seminary for eight years. |
Since the early 1970’s, Howard was a leading participant in the movement against apartheid in South Africa. When Nelson Mandela made his first trip to the U.S., Rev. Howard chaired the interfaith worship service at the Riverside Church where Mr. Mandela was welcomed to New York. During the 1979 hostage crisis in Iran, Rev. Howard conducted Christmas worship for Americans held captive in the U.S. embassy. In 1984, he chaired a delegation which, with Rev. Jesse Jackson, obtained the release of a U.S. Navy pilot imprisoned in Syria after having been shot down during a bombing mission over Lebanon.
A respected expert on international politics and religion, Rev. Howard has appeared on national television programs including The MacNeil Lehrer Report, David Frost, National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, and ABC’s Nightline with Ted Koppel.
|
|
Arthur A. Patchett, Ph.D., of Westfield, NJ, recently retired as a vice president of medicinal chemistry at Merck & Co, where he holds nearly 200 patents and initiated the research that led to the discovery of the blockbuster antihypertensive drugs, Vasotec and Prinivil. He was also instrumental in the discovery of the cholesterol-lowering drug Mevacor and its derivative, Zocor. Dr. Patchett’s work on Vasotec, Prinivil, Mevacor and Zocor alone helped the lives of millions and resulted in $63.5 billion in sales through 1998. His broad interests in discovery methods led him to initiate the CLIP (chemical lead identification program) screening system in the mid-1980’s. For the past 15 years, this screening protocol has produced most of the leads for Merck research programs worldwide. |
For his achievements, Dr. Patchett twice received Merck’s highest scientific honor, the Director’s Scientific Award. Last fall, Merck renamed its Rahway medicinal chemistry laboratory the Arthur A. Patchett Medicinal Chemistry Laboratory in his honor.
Dr. Patchett graduated from Princeton, was a Fulbright Scholar at Cambridge, and received his Ph.D. from Harvard with high praise from his mentor, the Nobel laureate R.B. Woodward.
|
|
Elizabeth Penick-Schmitz, of Montclair, NJ, is the author of several books for young readers including In The Room Across The Hall, Miss Janet And The Beautiful Ermeraa, and the inspirational Trip To Glory. She is also the author of the interpretative biography, The Lady Elizabeth Percy. In 1998, Ms. Penick-Schmitz published Our Own Business: S.B. Penick & Company, which chronicles the botanical drug firm founded by her father-in-law, Sydnor Barksdale Penick. The firm was sold to CPC International in 1967. At the time of its acquisition, S.B. Penick was considered by many to be the largest supplier in the world of botanicals for pharmaceutical and allied uses. |
Ms. Penick-Schmitz is an alumna of Wellesley College and before marriage, worked as director of publicity for a major publishing firm. Since then, she has been active in the cause of child welfare. Her interests center around the problems of abused and neglected children as well as tutoring for the Literacy Program.
|
|
Magaly Spector of Holmdel, NJ, Technical Manager - OADM Group at Lucent Technologies, is one of the highest-ranking female Hispanic scientists in the United States. Her life story is a lesson in perseverance. A former Cuban national chess champion, she arrived in the United States with nothing more than the clothes on her back. She struggled to learn English and eventually earned two advanced degrees. She also overcame the breakup of a marriage and the death of her daughter. |
She joined AT&T as a senior technical officer and began pursuing a graduate degree even though it meant commuting 45 miles one day a week to Lehigh University while continuing to work full-time. At Lucent, she has made major contributions to the advancement of physics, including advanced materials and devices for lasers and high speed-optical transport systems. She holds two patents, with another three pending. Spector worked on the Lucent team that developed the industry’s first 80-wavelength DWDM system, which can increase the flow of data in a fiber-optic network by carrying multiple beams of light.
Outside of work, Spector has dedicated her life to becoming a role model for women and the Hispanic community, and mentoring students in the summer.
Bloomfield College is an independent, four-year, co-educational institution offering 1,900 full- and part-time students programs in the liberal arts and pre-professional studies. The College has earned a national reputation for its innovative academic and co-curricular programs and for its mission - to prepare students to attain academic, personal and professional excellence in a multicultural and global society.
