ALUMNI NEWS
Charles Perrin 1/3/08. The past year has been a productive and enjoyable one. Travels took us to my conference on the Spanish coast between Barcelona and Valencia, and then to Marilyn's in Toronto, where David met us. In September we went to Molise, the unknown province of Italy, for the wedding of a postdoc from Marilyn's lab. This provided an excuse for a fascinating trip through Puglia, the heel of Italy that we had never visited. We finished in Rome, where we sampled New Year's services in the Great Synagogue. The attached photograph is of "trulli", characteristic houses in Alberobello. Other trips were to Phoenix for Thanksgiving, to Vancouver for David's birthday, to Los Angeles for Marilyn's high-school reunion, to San Francisco for the opera, and to Chicago for the ACS meeting.
The best trip was to Phoenix in March for the wedding of Edward and Allison, held at the Hilton resort. Both of them are specialists in geriatrics and hospice care. Family and friends came from all over the country. Currently the lab has one postdoc, one graduate student, and one undergraduate. A former Ph.D. student will spend six months as a Visiting Professor. Research goes well, especially a paper in JACS where we presented evidence for a new reaction of para-benzynes that we discovered. My NSF grant will be renewed, so I need not retire. Once more I am recovering from teaching introductory OChem to 380 students. Next week I return to the graduate course on Structure & Properties of Organic Molecules. This year I am a member of the campus committee on educational policy, of a subcommittee dealing with academic integrity, and of a statewide committee that takes me to Oakland once a month. Marilyn's research goes well, with a paper on the NMR structure of an important hormone receptor, the culmination of many years of work. We enjoyed visits by friends from Pittsburgh and from college. We were spared by the October wildfires that destroyed many houses in San Diego and forced half a million people to evacuate. We are dismayed at the deaths of colleagues Frank Westheimer, Stanley Miller, and Leslie Orgel. Another indication of the passage of time is that we now have wireless access at home and a cellphone in the car.
