The Dorothy Dillahunt Memorial Scholarship (2006-2009)
I met Dorothy Dillahunt over breakfast at a cafeteria in the World Trade Center Building in the early 1980s. I described that meeting in an essay published in the New York Times in 1986 (At the Wall) -we hit it off immediately and became friends, a friendship that remained until her death in 2005. After she died, my wife and I established a scholarship in her name that is described below.
Living Wage(a failed proposal)
the Living Wage movement is a nationwide attempt to establish a minimum wage that matches the cost of living in a given geographical locale (http://www.universallivingwage.org ). When I first encountered this program I felt strongly in their guiding principle - workers should be paid a minimum wage commensurate with what it costs to live in a specific geographical area of the country.
"One Race"
In 2003 I received a phone call from a contact at a national group whose goal was to encourage minority students to consider careers in biomedical research. He gave me the name, phone number and email address of John H., as a prospect for our PhD program.
I established contact with John and in one of his emails he told me that he was from Rwanda and had lived there through the horrific tribal genocide in the 1990s. He then wrote the following: