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In Memoriam
Daniel Arnon
(1910 - 1994) | Daniel I. Arnon spent his entire career at UC Berkeley. He was a leading figure in photosynthesis research for the latter half of the 20th century. He and his coworkers discovered the processes of cyclic and noncyclic photophosphorylation and the function of isolated chloroplasts in carrying out complete photosynthesis. He elucidated the role of ferredoxin in electron transport, and identified the reverse citric acid cycle for carbon dioxide fixation. |
Donald Kaplan
(1938 - 2007) | Donald Kaplan studied fundamental structural and developmental commonalities that underpin plant form across different groups of plants: algae, bryophytes, ferns, gymnosperms and angiosperms. |
Sydney Kustu
(1943 - 2014) | Sydney Govons Kustu was born in 1943 in Baltimore, Md. She earned a B.A. at Harvard University and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from UC Davis, and did post-doctoral work at UC Berkeley until 1973, when she was appointed to the UC Davis Bacteriology faculty. She remained at UC Davis until 1986, when she joined what was then Berkeley’s Microbiology and Immunology faculty, with a dual appointment in Plant Pathology. She retired in 2010. In addition to being a National Academy of Science member, Kustu garnered a large number of other awards during her career at Berkeley. She was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Microbiology. She also held a number of national and international professorships, including a prestigious Gauss Professorship at Universität Göttingen. For more than a decade, her work was supported by National Institutes of Health MERIT Awards. Kustu is best known for her seminal contributions on the responses of intestinal bacteria to nutrient limitations, particularly nitrogen. |
Watson M. Laetsch (1933- 2020) | Watson Laetsch grew walnuts commercially, raised antique apple varieties and had a vineyard producing Chardonnay and Merlot grapes, from which he made wine. He served on the College Advisory Board, was Co-Chair of the Bancroft Library Capital Campaign and the Mark Twain Lunch Club and was involved in Friends of Cal History, and he led Bear Treks with his wife. He was the past Chair-, of the Board of Directors, Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute; Member, Board of Directors, Children's Hospital and Research Center at Oakland; and Member, Board of Trustees, University of California Press Foundation. |
Roderic Park
(1932 - 2013)
| Park first joined the UC Berkeley community in 1960 as a faculty member and dedicated the following 3 decades to this campus. He served as Department Chair, the Provost and Dean of the College of Letters and Science from 1972 to 1980, before moving on to the second highest decorated position on campus - Executive Vice-Chancellor and Provost - from 1980 to 1990. |
Ian Sussex
(1927 - 2015) | Sussex joined the newly established Department of Plant Biology, UC Berkeley on July 1, 1990. He was instrumental in the establishment of the National Science Foundation Center for Plant Developmental Biology in the College of Natural Resources, directed a thriving research lab in Koshland Hall, and mentored a large number of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, many of whom went on to become prominent plant developmental biologists. While at Berkeley he co‐taught a number of courses including Cell and Developmental Biology of Plants and Functional Plant Anatomy. Sussex retired from UCB on June 30, 1997 and moved back to Connecticut where he rejoined Yale University as scientist and lecturer. |
