Clark University

Santiago Ramón y Cajal ForMemRS was a Spanish pathologist, histologist, neuroscientist, and Nobel laureate. His pioneering investigations of... the microscopic structure of the brain were original: he is considered by many to be the father of modern neuroscience. He was skilled at drawing, and hundreds of his illustrations of brain cells are still used for educational purposes today. The son of physician and anatomy lecturer Justo Ramón and Antonia Cajal, Ramón y Cajal was born of Aragonese parents in Petilla de Aragón in Navarre, Spain. As a child he was transferred between many different schools because of his poor behavior and anti-authoritarian attitude. An extreme example of his precociousness and rebelliousness is his imprisonment at the age of eleven for destroying the town gate with a homemade cannon. He was an avid painter, artist, and gymnast, but his father neither appreciated nor encouraged this abilities. In order to tame his unruly character, his father apprenticed him to a shoemaker and barber, and was well known for his pugnacious attitude.
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William Leonard Langer was the chair of the history department at Harvard University and the World War II volunteer head of the Research and... Analysis branch of the Office of Strategic Services. He was the older brother of psychoanalst Walter Charles Langer. Born in South Boston, Massachusetts, he was the second of three sons of recent German immigrants, Charles Rudolph and Johanna Rockenbach. His elder brother Rudolph Langer became a mathematician and younger brother Walter Charles Langer, a psychoanalyst. When William was only three years old, his father died unexpectedly, leaving the family in difficult circumstances. Nevertheless, his mother, who supported the family by working as a dressmaker, made education a priority for her children. After studying at the Boston Latin School, Langer attended Harvard University. Being fluent in German, he then taught German at Worcester Academy while furthering his own education with courses on international relations at Clark University. His job and education were interrupted by service in the United States Army on the frontlines in France during World War I.
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Lewis Madison Terman was an American psychologist, noted as a pioneer in educational psychology in the early 20th century at the Stanford University... School of Education. He is best known as the inventor of the Stanford-Binet IQ test. He was a prominent eugenicist and was a member of the Human Betterment Foundation. He also served as president of the American Psychological Association. Terman received a B.S., B.Pd. , and B.A. from Central Normal College in 1894 and 1898, and a B.A. and M.A. from the Indiana University Bloomington in 1903. He received his Ph.D. from Clark University in 1905. He worked as a school principal in San Bernardino, California in 1905, and as a professor at Los Angeles Normal School in 1907. In 1910 he joined the faculty of Stanford University as a professor of educational psychology at the invitation of Ellwood Patterson Cubberley and remained associated with the university until his death. He served as chairman of the psychology department from 1922 to 1945.
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Solomon Lefschetz was an American mathematician who did fundamental work on algebraic topology, its applications to algebraic geometry, and the... theory of non-linear ordinary differential equations. He was born in Moscow into a Jewish family who moved shortly after that to Paris. He was educated there in engineering at the École Centrale Paris, but emigrated to the USA in 1905. He was badly injured in an industrial accident in 1907, losing both hands. He moved towards mathematics, receiving a Ph.D. in algebraic geometry from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1911. He then took positions in University of Nebraska and University of Kansas, moving to Princeton University in 1924, where he was soon given a permanent position. He remained there until 1953. In the application of topology to algebraic geometry, he followed the work of Charles Émile Picard, whom he had heard lecture in Paris at the École Centrale Paris.
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Albert Abraham Michelson was an American physicist known for his work on the measurement of the speed of light and especially for the... Michelson-Morley experiment. In 1907 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics. He became the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in sciences. Michelson was born in Strzelno, Provinz Posen in the Kingdom of Prussia into a Jewish family. He moved to the US with his parents in 1855, at the age of two. He grew up in the mining towns of Murphy's Camp, California and Virginia City, Nevada, where his father was a merchant. Despite his family being Jewish by birth, his family were non-religious. Michelson was later said to be a lifelong agnostic. He spent his high school years in San Francisco in the home of his aunt, Henriette Levy , who was the mother of author Harriet Lane Levy. President Ulysses S. Grant awarded Michelson a special appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy in 1869. During his four years as a midshipman at the Academy, Michelson excelled in optics, heat, climatology and drawing.
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Thomas Kühne is the Strassler Family Chair in the Study of Holocaust History and Professor of History at Clark University.