Eberly College of Science Honors Four With Outstanding Science Alumni Award

19 September 2006—Four Eberly College of Science alumni were honored recently with the Outstanding Science Alumni Awards. These awards were established by the Board of Directors of the Eberly College of Science Alumni Society in 1997 to recognize outstanding science alumni for their leadership in science and for the impact they have had and will continue to have on society and on their professions. It recognizes alumni who have a record of significant professional achievements in their field, and who are outstanding role models for the current students in the college.

Kenneth Adelberg is the president and chief executive officer of the HiFi House Group of Companies, a privately-held diversified distributor and retailer of audio, video, and telecommunications products for industrial, commercial, and consumer markets.

Adelberg received bachelor's degrees in biophysics and psychology from Penn State in 1974, and pursued master's level study at Drexel University and at Temple University's Graduate Tax Institute. He is the founder and director of Newco Partners, Inc., a technology-transfer company, and of the spinoff company OST, Inc., which provides biometric technologies to secure personal and economic transactions, such as signature verification. He is a board member of Interactive Medicine, Inc., which provides internet-based interactive tools and programs designed to innovate the delivery of healthcare information and services. He is a general partner in the recreation and real estate-development firm Anderson Creek Partners in North Carolina and in Fieldpoint Partners SBIC, a venture-capital fund that works with companies that focus on technology, the internet, and new media markets.

Charles Buchas is corporate vice president and treasurer of FedEx Corporation, a global transportation and logistics holding company. He is responsible for the establishment and execution of all programs for financing the capital needs of the corporation, the design and development of methods of dealing with non-speculative risk, and for treasury operations of the corporation's five business units. Prior to his current position, he was vice president and treasurer of Federal Express Corporation from 1991 to 1998. He joined Federal Express as a senior financial analyst in 1980, was promoted to manager in 1981, and to managing director in 1989.

Prior to joining Federal Express, Buchas was a senior financial analyst at General Foods Corporation. He received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Penn State in 1971 and a master's degree in finance from the University of Pennsylvania in 1979.

Stephen Mayo is an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and professor of biology and chemistry at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He is a pioneer in the field of protein design. His work at the interface of theory, computation, and experiment is aimed at understanding the physical and chemical determinants of protein structure, stability, and function. In a 1997 scientific paper published in the journal Science, he and his coworkers demonstrated that they were able to develop a theoretical model and a computational model for designing amino-acid sequences and then showed, experimentally, that the models worked by successfully designing a protein that folded to the desired structure.

Mayo earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry at Penn State in 1983 and a doctoral degree in chemistry at the California Institute of Technology in 1987. He has been recognized as a Rita Allen Foundation Scholar, a David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellow, and a Searle Scholar. In 1997 he was awarded the Johnson Foundation Prize for Innovative Research in Structural Biology. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2004.

Prior to joining the faculty at Caltech, he cofounded the software company Molecular Simulations, Inc., where he worked to develop computational modeling tools to analyze proteins and to run molecular-mechanics and molecular-dynamics simulations on proteins. In 1997 he cofounded Xencor, where he served as chair of the scientific advisory board through 2005. Researchers at Xencor use computational protein-design methods to design novel protein-based therapeutics.

Mary Osborn is a cell biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany, and an honorary professor on the medical faculty at the University of Göttingen. Her work has been recognized with the Meyenburg prize for cancer research and the 2002 L'Oreal/UNESCO Prize given to women for excellence in scienceand with an honorary doctorate from the Pomerian Medical Academy in Poland.

Her research interests have focused on proteins of the cytoskeleton as well as on certain proteins of the cell nucleus. Her work has stressed the use of antibodies to determine the arrangements of the different cytoskeletal structures in cells and in tissues. Antibodies made in her laboratory have been licensed to many companies in and outside Europe. She helped develop techniques for sodium-dodecyl-sulphate (SDS) gel electrophoresis and immunofluorescence microscopy, both now commonly used in laboratories worldwide.

Osborn earned a bachelor's degree in physics at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom in 1962. She earned master's and doctoral degrees in biophysics at Penn State in 1963 and 1967, respectively. She is a trustee of the Swedish Foundation on the Environment, MISTRA, and has chaired both the Scientific Advisory Board of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg and the Cell Biology Section of Academia Europaea. She currently is president of the International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Prior to joining the scientific staff at the Max Planck Institute in 1975, she was on the staff of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory from 1972 to 1975. She was on the scientific staff of the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, England, from 1969 to 1972 and was a research fellow at Harvard University from 1967 to 1969.

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