ALUMNI NEWS
Charles Perrin 1/4/10.
2009 was a good year. I was promoted to the UC rank of Above-Scale, which permits me to designate myself as Distinguished Professor. That came with an 8% pay reduction, owing to the state's financial difficulties, and next year may be worse, with an increased teaching load. We did celebrate my colleague Roger Tsien, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Our grandson Samuel is now 18 months old, walking and beginning to talk. David and Christie bought a cozy 100-year old house in a convenient location in Vancouver. We have been to visit both families, and we all got together in Phoenix and in Vancouver and at a beach resort on Vancouver Island.
In April/May I spent four weeks in Germany (seminars in Berlin, Nuremberg, Munich) and Zurich, where I gave a series of lectures on practical kinetics. Unfortunately Marilyn could not go with me, because a renewal of her lab's five-year grant was due. On Christmas Day we returned from the KISPOC conference in Fukuoka, Japan. After the conference we spent an extra week touring Mt. Aso (with hot springs), Beppu (more hot springs, and where we stayed in an elegant ryokan, with tatami mats), and Kyoto and Nara (the old capital, before it was moved to Kyoto in 794). In June we went to my 50th college reunion, when we saw many old friends. After that we spent a weekend with my brother in Brookline and Cape Cod, and then a week in New York, where we visited Marilyn's family and saw five plays on Broadway. It was our 45th wedding anniversary, which we spent with old friends, with whom we then spent a weekend in Portland OR for their 40th. We also enjoyed visits by friends from Sweden and from Boston. The cultural scene in San Diego kept us busy, with early-music and chamber-music concerts, operas, oratorios, and plays. Also I went to three operas and several museums in Europe.
Research goes well but slowly. Two new graduate students are in the lab, along with one continuing and a post-doc. I have been named Chair of a Task Force to revise and update the 1994 IUPAC Glossary of Physical Organic Chemistry. I just finished teaching 400 students introductory OChem and caught three of them copying on an exam. Next I will be obliged to present the evidence to a Hearing Board, and I continue to serve on Hearing Boards for other students, which at least releases me from service on UCSD's Committee on Educational Policy. On Tuesday I return to the course on kinetics and mechanism, which now attaches a parallel undergraduate version. Marilyn continues research on the structure and activity of CRF receptors.
