PASADENA—The California Institute of Technology has received a $1.1 million gift from Pasadena philanthropists Alexander and Adelaide Hixon for the creation of a new writing center and an annual undergraduate writing prize.

The gift will be used to establish the Alexander P. and Adelaide F. Hixon Writing Center, which will be available for use by the Caltech student body. The center will be directed by a professional with credentials in composition and rhetoric, and will provide a range of instruction and services in basic composition.

PASADENA—In a year when Latinos overwhelmingly favor the Democrats on the issues, one would expect Al Gore to have a huge lead over George W. Bush in polls of Latino voters.

But he doesn't—and no one really knows why, says R. Michael Alvarez, a professor of political science at the California Institute of Technology and an authority on Latino voting patterns.

Dr. Camerer Elected as Econometric Society Fellow

PASADENA—California Institute of Technology humanities professor Daniel J. Kevles was awarded the History of Science Society's 1999 Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize for his book The Baltimore Case: A Trial of Politics, Science, and Character.

PASADENA-Whether Edgar Rice Burroughs was writing his successful Tarzan novels or promoting his early-20th-century suburb, Tarzana, he always seemed to be making the world safe for bwana.

That's the conclusion of Catherine Jurca, an assistant professor of literature at the California Institute of Technology. Jurca is writing a book tentatively titled "White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel." One chapter examines Tarzan in light of Burroughs' activities as a suburban real-estate developer in Los Angeles.

PASADENA—The California Institute of Technology has received a $90,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in support of the newly created Mellon Seminar in Interpretation.

The Mellon seminar, to be taught jointly by Caltech Associate Professor of History William Deverell and Amy Meyers, curator of American art at the Huntington Library, will address the intersection between documentary and visual records in American history. Eight graduate students from across the United States will come to Pasadena to take part in the eight-week program.

PASADENA— Eleanor M. Searle, Edie and Lew Wasserman Professor of History, Emeritus, died Tuesday, April 6. She was 72.

Searle held the distinction of being the first woman at the Institute to receive a named professorship, to which she was appointed in 1988. She joined the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Caltech in 1979, after serving as a member of the faculty at UCLA for the previous 10 years.

Caltech anthropologist, Thayer Scudder, has been appointed to the World Commission on Dams, created by the World Conservation Union and the World Bank to review the costs and benefits of large dams throughout the world.

PASADENA—Daniel J. Kevles, the Koepfli Professor of the Humanities at Caltech, was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society at their annual meeting April 26 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Kevles is one of 31 resident and 8 foreign members elected this year, and his election brings the number of APS members on the Caltech faculty to 15.

Kevles, who is chair of the faculty at Caltech, studies and teaches in the fields of history, politics, and ethics as they apply to science.