Back in December, the Reed College News Center carried this post,
“Portland, OR (December 13, 2012)— Amgen, a California-based biotechnology company, has created a chair of chemical biology with a $3 million gift to Reed College. The Amgen-Perlmutter Chair honors Roger M. Perlmutter’s service as Amgen’s Executive Vice President of Research and Development. Perlmutter, a Reed College graduate, currently serves as chairman of the college’s board of trustees. Amgen’s donation is the largest corporate gift in the college’s history …” (continue reading)
And yesterday it was revealed that Prof. Arthur Glasfeld has been named as the college’s first Amgen-Perlmutter Professor of Chemistry. The announcement from the Dean’s office reads, in part, “This appointment reflects the college’s deep appreciation for Arthur’s excellent service to the academic program, the wonderful contributions that he has made to the lives of his students, and the leadership that he has shown as a citizen of this community.”
To this, we add, “Hear, Hear!”
For those who have encountered Arthur mainly through his presentation of the steady-state approximation or the famous Nine Solutions lab, we would like to point to his incredibly eclectic curiosity and intellect, his tremendous energy, and his unswerving commitment to Reed. He routinely teaches introductory and structural biochemistry, but he has also taught organic chemistry, metabolic biochemistry, a special topics course in bio-inorganic chemistry, and Senior symposium (and he is currently threatening to teach a Hum 110 conference and a semester of physical chemistry at some point in the not-too-distant future). On top of that, Arthur has been awarded many extramural grants for his research in protein structure-function relationships, and he has supervised over 90 senior theses, many of which have resulted in journal publications.